Archive - Jan 15, 2015 - Story

Following disappointing results from JPM and Wells Fargo yesterday, it was Bank of America's turn to "surprise" investors with its disclosure just how bad its quarter was. And with the bank reporting a 50% collapse in its sales and trading from Q3, down $600 million from a year ago to just $1.7 billion in Q4, it should come as no surprise that the bank just reported Net Income, before the usual spate of amusing addbacks, of $0.25 well below the $0.31 expected. And while one may argue whether ot not BofA's EPS deserve non-GAAP adbacks, it was the Revenue of $18.96 billion, which missed expectations of $21.03 billion by over $2 billion (!) and down $2.7 billion from a year ago, that was truly a showstropper and shows that without the Fed's visible hand manipulating markets every day, banks are a ticking time bomb just waiting to blow.

To paraphrase a trader who walked into the biggest FX clusterfuck in years, "it's total, unprecedented market turmoil."  So while the world gets a grip on what today's historic move by the SNB means, which judging by the record 13% collapse in the Swiss Stock Market shows clearly that the SNB market put is dead and the SNB may be the first central-banking hedge fund which just folded (we can't wait to see what the SNB P&L losses on its EURCHF holdings will be), here is what has happened so far for anyone unlucky enough to be walking into the carnage some 2 hours late.

Over a decade ago, George Soros took on the Bank of England, and won. Less than two hours ago the Swiss National Bank took on virtually every single macro hedge fund, the vast majority of which were short the Swiss Franc and crushed them, when it announced, first, that it would go further into NIRP, pushing its interest rate on deposit balances even more negative from -0.25% to -0.75%, a move which in itself would have been unprecedented and, second, announcing that the 1.20 EURCHF floor it had instituted in September 2011, the day gold hit its all time nominal high, was no more. What happened next was truly shock and awe as algo after algo saw their EURCHF 1.1999 stops hit, and moments thereafter the EURCHF pair crashed to less then 0.75, margining out virtually every single long EURCHF position, before finally rebounding to a level just above 1.00, which is where it was trading just before the SNB instituted the currency floor over three years ago.

In what has been the most anticipated bankruptcy case in the past several years, hours ago Caesars Entertainment put its main operating unit under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Northern Illinois bankruptcy court (case 15-01153) even as a splinter group of dissident creditors including Appaloosa and Oaktree, holders of about $41 million of Caesars debt and which allege the company has siphoned off billions in value from creditors, put the company into involuntary bankruptcy in Delaware bankruptcy court on January 12. As a reminder, Caesars was one of the sterling LBOs of the last credit bubble, when in 2008 Apollo and TPG decided to take the company private. The problem, as is always the case: too much debt, especially when combined with a broken business model, as Caesars has lost money every year since 2009.