Archive - Jan 11, 2015 - Story

People are becoming more critical of our current monetary system. In the past six years, central banks have promised us growth within six months’ time. They and the whole monetary and financial system have lost credibility. The banks’ profit to GDP is the highest in history in an economic environment where we have the highest amount of unemployment since WWII. There is something very wrong with the way the system works and this is all due to the overemphasis on trying to minimize the business cycle. The real conclusion of QE can only become visible if we experience the full business cycle. In Jakobsen's view, we have never been allowed to have a down cycle since 2008. But now, there is finally going to be a down cycle because central planners can’t print more money. As Jakobsen puts it: “Now is the time for the real economy to take over”.

Why does one believe the word “catastrophe” was used by The Fed's Charlie Evans? Hmmmmm? After all, the very articulated and polished minutes of what members expressed to one another as to set the current policy was just made public. We thought the verbiage of choice was now “patient.” Unless... You know you’ve either lost, or in the process, of losing control of the markets ear. In our opinion, this is an unveiled showing of possible outright panic developing behind the proverbial curtain.

While in no way minimizing the terror that must have been extreme among the drivers and passengers of these 200 vehicles as they slowed, slid, and slammed into one another on I-94 (near Battle Creek, Michigan), one can't help but analogize to the two most crowded trades in the world right now and what happens when the traders' "liquidity" is the same as the drivers' "visibility."

Let’s focus on what happened in the lead up to the summer of 2011, right before the markets cratered on the back of everything that was going on in Europe and the downgrade of the US' credit rating by S&P. The leveraged loans index peaked at the start of the year and traded sideways up until that eventful August. This was a sign that something was not right in the credit markets; and equities pretty much followed the same pattern.  If we fast forward to today, we can see that the leveraged loans index peaked in July 2014, indicated by the red line in the graph, and has noticeably declined since; at the same time equities continued to move higher, a divergence which is a novelty in this bull market. Is this telling us something?  We believe so - it is a red flag for equities.

A day when over 700,000 people are said to have taken part in marches across France in Paris, Orleans, Nice, Pau, Toulouse and Nantes, following three days of deadly attacks in the Paris area to commemorate the victims' memories, there was another attack which may be tied to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, this time by unknown assailants who launched an incendiary device on the building of German newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost shortly after 2am local time when nobody was in the building, and which, as Bloomberg reports, had in recent days reproduced the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo.