Archive - Sep 30, 2014 - Story

As experts (as opposed to President Obama) had warned, the probability of Ebola coming to the US is around 20% by year-end. So it should not be a total surprise that:

*CDC CONFIRMS FIRST EBOLA CASE DIAGNOSED IN THE UNITED STATES, PATIENT IS IN DALLAS HOSPITAL, NEWS 8 REPORTS
*CDC DIRECTOR SAYS: `THERE IS NO DOUBT WE WILL STOP IT HERE'

The patient recently returned (via plane) from traveling from Liberia, West Africa. This perhaps explains why CDC was "taking precautions in the US" as we noted previously. And don't forget the administration's interference in Ebola treatments.

Something quite "crazy" indeed (not our words).

Here come the revisionists with new malarkey about the 2008 financial crisis. No less august a forum than the New York Times today carries a front page piece by journeyman financial reporter James Stewart suggesting that Lehman Brothers was solvent; could and should have been bailed out; and that the entire trauma of the financial crisis and Great Recession might have been avoided or substantially mitigated. That is not just meretricious nonsense; its a measure of how thoroughly corrupted public discourse about the fundamental financial and economic realities of the present era has become owing to the cult of central banking. The great error of September 2008 was not in failing to bailout Lehman. It was in providing a $100 billion liquidity hose to Morgan Stanley and an even larger one to Goldman.  They too were insolvent. That was the essence of their business model. Fed policies inherently generate runs, and then it stands ready with limitless free money to rescue the gamblers.  You can call that pragmatism, if you like. But don’t call it capitalism.

While Greek government yields (and political leaders) proclaim the troubled peripheral European nation is 'recovering', the risk of major political upheaval in Greece has not gone away ahead of next year's presidential vote next year. As Reuters notes, under growing pressure from anti-bailout leftists, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras desperately needs a new narrative to get the backing of lawmakers and rally Greeks fed up with four years of austerity. We wish him luck as Keep Talking Greece notes, it is high time that the real data of the economic situation of the Greek society come to the surface and so it did this week. A report from Greece's State Budget Office found that three in every five Greeks, or some 6.3 million people, were living in poverty or under the threat of poverty in 2013 due to material deprivation and unemployment.

Two classes of warships kicked off the U.S.-led attacks on Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Khorasan group. WSJ's Jason Bellini explains what are these ships' capabilities?

The U.S. government is borrowing about 8 trillion dollars a year... The only way that this game can continue is if the U.S. government can continue to borrow gigantic piles of money at ridiculously low interest rates. And our current standard of living greatly depends on the continuation of this game. If something comes along and rattles this Ponzi scheme, life in America could change radically almost overnight.

The "confidence" gap between high-income and low-income earners has never been larger... Thank you Ben and Janet...

Reports of individuals snapping up near-record numbers of gold and silver coins are coming in from around the world. While individual buyers aren't the dominant players in precious metals, they do make a difference; and their renewed enthusiasm is matched by some recent national trends. There's no guarantee that this buying, encouraging as it seems, is anything more than a blip; but in the aggregate it does seem like a lot of buyers, old and new, are finding current prices to be attractive. That's how bottoms form and new bull markets begin.

New investigations by the Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General have found SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet's announcement that small businesses received 23.39% of all federal contracts was greatly exaggerated. As WaPo reports, Federal agencies overstated their success last year in contracting with small businesses that face socio-economic disadvantages finding $400 million worth of contracts that agencies gave to ineligible firms but still counted toward their targets. Rather stunningly, the report found of the top 100 recipients of the highest dollar amount of federal small business contracts, over 75% were actually current large businesses. Trust...

It is very common to find examples of stock quotes changing rapidly - hundreds and sometimes thousands of times per second in a single stock. At the extreme, we've seen in excess of 25,000 quote changes in a single stock in one second of time or less. Sometimes a simple pattern evolves from the quote price changes, such as in the case of a certain High Frequency Trading (HFT) algorithm that we've recently seen run every day in Google stock. The algo starts with an order to buy 100 shares, then replaces a millisecond (ms) later with an order to buy a penny higher.. and repeats hundreds of times. "So what? HFT needs to be able to cancel quotes fast so they can tighten spreads, add liquidity and lower costs." The problem is that when HFT cancels a quote after just 1 ms, then anyone located more than 93 miles (150 km) away will see a stale quote. Worse, they won't know it's stale unless and until they try to act on it and wait for a response.

For a long time, Fed printing via balance sheet expansion has been the key to understanding markets and the predominant driver that has trumped all other matters.  Investors have been able to ignore significant global events, tensions, and economic conditions in faraway places, because a lower real and perceived risk premium from implicit Fed promises was the single most important aspect driving asset prices higher.  This game is quickly coming to an end. As the Fed’s asset purchase program ends next month, global events and global economic fundamentals will have to be taken into account and priced accordingly.

"Two to three years is enough, not only to launch [settlements in rubles], but also to complete these mechanisms," says Andrey Kostin, head of Russia’s second-biggest bank VTB, noting that the possibility of the US and EU widening sanctions to exclude Russia from the SWIFT global money transfer system would become “a point of no return” making any further dialog impossible. However, as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin explains in this interview, how Russia's military and industrial complex is responding to a growing threat from America. Russia is not responding with any talk about the nuclear button (at least not yet); but they are preparing for such an eventuality: "we are creating a nuclear submarine fleet... capable of reaching any country on any continent, if [USA] suddenly becomes the aggressor, and our top-most national interests come under threat," adding that Obama's coup has ushered in "the complete demise of the Ukrainian State."

"Power devolves to dictatorship whenever there are no checks and balances. This is a simple truth of history without exceptions."

Despite the ubiquitous v-shaped recovery in stocks from the US open to EU close (decoupling entirely from bonds), stocks slumped into the end of the quarter leaving the S&P and Dow barely positive for Q3 and Russell 2000 down 7.9% - its worst quarter since Q2 2011 (and -5.2% year-to-date). Treasury yields flip-flopped around in a 4-5bps range with a late-day ramp (suggesting liquidations cough PIMCO cough) leaving 30Y -1bps on the week. The USDollar suged higher in the European session and traded lower in the US session. The bigger news on the day was the carnage in commodities that appeared to occur around the European close (desk chatter of commodity fund liquidations). Silver and WTI Crude were monkey-hammered, gold and copper dropped to down 1% on the week. VIX pumped and dumped again but closed above 16. Stocks closed very weak with Russell tumbling 1.5% on the day to not "off the lows."