Archive - Jul 2014 - Story

As China's anti-corruption crackdown continues, the crony-capitalists are slowly exposed. As EJ Insight reports, the son-in-law of former PBOC governor and former Tianjin mayor Dai Xianglong bought millions of dollars of shares (via offshore entities) ahead of Beijing's decision to allow mainland residents buy Hong Kong stocks directly. It appears the Chinese have learned a lot from the West.

Boeing has had a tough week or two - the scandal over Ex-Im bank - its cheap funding source of competitive advantage, this weekend's train derailment of Boeing fuselages, and now, in Barcelona, a 767 and an Airbus A340 battle for the same airpsace coming within a few hundred feet of total carnage. We can only hope Janet Yellen's 'macro-prudential' policies will be less of a near-miss of the total collapse in risk assets we suspect is coming...

"Here in one of the "fly-over" zones of America - 200 miles north of New York City - the financial economy is mythical realm like Shangri-La and the real economy is somewhere between the toilet and a rat hole. Under the tyranny of chain stores, there really is no true local commercial economy. The few jobs here are menial and nearly superfluous to the automatic workings of the giant companies..." Never has a society entered an epochal transition with such unpreparedness. Never has a society appeared so childishly decadent.

100% of people have a view on Thomas Piketty's "Capital In The 21st Century" - for better or worse - confidently spewing supportive anecdotes of what they think he said and what they believe he means... But, as WSJ reports, people who spent hard-earned (or government-subsidized) money to buy his socialist tome have only read 2.4%. It appears few - if any - made it past page 26... Perhaps they would all be better off reading this.

Hurricane Arthur may have been, pardon us Jamie Dimon, a "tempest in a teapot" fizzling quietly in the Atlantic, but halfway around the world, a far greater storm is currently picking up speed and barreling toward Japan. As Reuters reports, Typhoon Neoguri, described as a "once in decades storm" is set to rake the Okinawa island chain with heavy rain and powerful winds. Typhoon Neoguri was already gusting at more than 250 km an hour (150 mph) and may pick up still more power as it moves northwest, growing into an "extremely intense" storm by Tuesday, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. "In these regions, there is a chance of the kinds of storms, high seas, storm surges and heavy rains that you've never experienced before," a JMA official told a news conference. "This is an extraordinary situation, where a grave danger is approaching."

In Wenzhou - dubbed the capital of China's private businesses - nearly 90 per cent of loan guarantors have failed since the start of the credit crisis arising from the underground banking system, according to the media. As SCMP reports, although their services are critical for the economic system and the millions of small firms - that provide the majority of the mainland's jobs - hundreds of loan guarantee groups are creaking under the weight of bad loans and are simply unable to bear any more. "It could become the last straw that breaks the camel's back," exclaims the head of a local law firm, "without the privately owned small businesses, China's economy won't have a future." But PMIs are up so everything's fine?

So far the 21st Century has not been especially kind to equity investors. Yes, markets usually do bounce back, but often in time frames that defy optimistic expectations. Thhe real (inflation-adjusted) purchasing power of that $1,000 is currently, over 14 years later, only $218 above break-even. That equates to a 1.39% annualized real return.

Even as the western media finally remembered over the weekend there was a Ukraine civil war going on following an advance by the Kiev army to retake some rebel strongholds in the Donbas region, with some curious what if anything Putin would do in retaliation, what Putin, or rather his envoy Sergei Lavrov were actually doing, was completely ignoring the Ukraine situation (where the West has long since conceded the loss of Crimea to the Kremlin) and instead focusing on securing the successful launch of the South Stream (remember: the second South Stream goes online, Ukraine becomes irrelevant). And since Russia already signed another historic agreement with Austria in June, which positioned the AAA-country (with some surprising emerging bank troubles subsequently) squarely against its fellow European peers, it was the turn of the other South Stream countries, namely Bulgaria.

Curious what Uber is spending the record $1.2 billion in cash it raised in its most recent funding round (which valued it at a whopping $18.2 billion)? The answer: subsidies. In a page right out of Amazon's playbook, the management of Uber has found that the best use of proceeds now that it may have finally saturated addressable markets, is to use its cash on hand to fund sub-equilibrium pricing losses and in the process, hopefully, put its competition out of business. Earlier today, the Uber blog announced that UberX is "now cheaper than a New York City taxi."

So, Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt (post gas price surges), and now Israel... As the teen deaths, rocket launches (and landings), and rhetoric fly back back and forth; it appears last week's de-escalation is off...

*ISRAEL ARMY SPOKESMAN SAYS TROOPS BEING BOOSTED ON GAZA BORDER
*ISRAELI ARMY SAYS IT IS PREPARING FOR POSSIBLE GAZA ESCALATION

The US administration has been oddly quiet so far on this... we await their 'supportive' comments.

Whocouldanode? Treasury yields continue to push lower (now below Thursday's lows) having not looked back since the jobs report. Stocks - having exuberantly spurted to record highs to ensure American consumer comfort over the long weekend - have now collapsed back and given up all their post-"great-jobs-report" gains... CNBC is puzzled...

It appears the hopes and dreams of a resurgence in US GDP in Q2 will have to be extended-and-pretended another quarter. As Gallup notes, Americans' self-reports of daily spending fell back in June, averaging $91 for the month - down notably from a six-year high of $98 in May - and flat to the $90 average found in June 2013. Not exactly the pent-up demand 'surge' so many economists (and Fed PhDs) have been calling for... Even more concerning, Gallup notes, the drop in daily spending among all Americans can largely be attributed to upper-income Americans spending less in June. Even the 1% are cutting back?

We warned Thursday that there was something wrong with the picture of the equity market's exuberance but it seems the July-4th-week-effect has run its course and equity markets - having read the jobs report over the weekend - have realized it is anything but strong. The Dow just lost 17,000 (however briefly) and equities are catching down to Treasury yield's drop as USDJPY loses 102.00.

The jobs report has little value if we don't peer beneath the glossy veneer.

It was only two weeks ago when Bed Bath and Beyond reported earnings that missed across the top and bottom line. And while the company has little control over contracting revenues, one reason it may have missed on the EPS (at $0.93 vs $0.95) was the "contraction" in buybacks. A contraction, incidentally, which we use loosely, because it followed a February quarter repurchase amount that blew out all historical buybacks out of the water at over half a billion as shown in the chart below.  The bigger problem is that with just $861 million left under its existing buyback authorization, this most popular pathway for New Normal "growth" would have been promptly shut for the company at the current pace of buying up its own stock as soon as two more quarters. So what does Bed Bath and Beyond Buybacks do? Why it promptly authorized just the thing the central-planning doctor ordered: an authorization to buy even more shares back, some $2 billion worth to be precise.