Archive - Jan 19, 2015 - Story

A month ago we asked the following question: who in addition to the Netherlands has been quietly withdrawing their gold from the NY Fed. Was it Belgium? Or did the Dutch simply decide to haul back some more. Or did Germany finally get over its "logistical complications" which prevented it from transporting more than just a laughable 5 tons in 2013? And most importantly, did Germany finally grow a pair and decide not to let "diplomatic difficulties" stand between it and its gold? We now know the answer, and it was, indeed, the latter with confirmation coming from the Bundesbank itself. As the German Central Bank announced earlier today, after withdrawing an embarrassing 5 tonnes of gold from New York in  2013, its rate of repatriation soared, and in what appears to have been just the past two months, has transferred a whopping 85 tonnes of gold from 80 feet below street level at Liberty 33 back to Frankfurt!

Events are moving faster than brains now. Isn’t it marvelous that gasoline at the pump is a buck cheaper than it was a year ago? A lot of short-sighted idiots are celebrating, unaware that the low oil price is destroying the capacity to deliver future oil at any price. The table is set for the banquet of consequences. The next chapter in the oil story is more likely to be scarcity rather than just a boomerang back to higher prices. The tipping point for that will come with the inevitable destabilizing of Saudi Arabia. Next time around, the federals are going to have to confiscate stuff, break promises, take away things, and rough some people up. The question is how much of this abuse will the public take?

In response to the 2008 crisis, the world's major central banks pumped an unprecedented amount of monetary stimulus into the system -- all in the name of kick-starting enough economic growth to pull the planet out of its fundamental sinkhole of Too Much Debt. More than six years and over $4 trillion later, what exactly can we say it did for us? Not enough, as the following short video summarizes...

Below is a chronological progression of the famous Credit Suisse global wealth pyramid showing a dusturbing trend. Try to spot it.

As we noted last week, the Swiss National Bank's decision to un-peg from the Euro (thus strengthening the CHF dramatically) will have very significant repercussions - not the least of which is for Hungarian and Polish Swiss-Franc-denominated mortgage-holders. The 20% surge in Swiss Franc translates directly into a comparable jump in the zloty value of loan principles and and monthly payments for about 575,000 Polish families owing a total $35 billion in mortgages denominated in the Swiss currency which has prompted calls for Poland's government to bail them out. Never mind the FX risk, the low-rates were all anyone cared about and now yet another 'risk-free' trade has exploded, Deputy PM Piechocinski says, if the franc "remains above the 4 zloty level, the government may provide support" to debtors but Poland's Central Bank is not supportive of the bailout.

China's broad stock indices were flip-flopping between gains and losses from the open (although securities firms continued to get monkey-hammered on more tightening by regulators) heading into the avalanche of data that hit at 2100ET. GDP growth - which was estimated at sub-7% based on real-time hard-date - was released/leaked 10mins early - rising 7.3% YoY in Q4 (just beating expectations of a 7.2% rise) but grew only 1.5% QoQ (missing the 1.7% expectation). Then came Retail Sales - beating by the most since May 2014 with a 11.9% YoY gain (against 11.7% expectations). Industrial Production grew at 7.9% YoY (beating expectations of 7.4% by the most since July 2013). Of course the fact that Chinese GDP growth of 7.4% YoY was the weakest since 1990 was entirely ignored as the immediate reaction was Yuan and Chinese equity strength.

for years the big money managers stoically took it on the chin, and whether out of lazyness or some other unexplained motive, allowed their orders to continue being HFT-frontrun on public exchanges and 3rd party dark pools year after year, making VWAP and TWAP orders a cost center, boosting the case that HFTs aren't really bad for stocks. Until now. According to the WSJ, some of America's largest mutual funds and asset managers led by Fidelity Investments "are close to launching a private trading venue designed to let them buy and sell large blocks of stock without the involvement of Wall Street firms and high-speed traders, according to people familiar with the matter." The new venture is the who's who of traditional asset management and includes nine firms, including BlackRock Inc., Bank of New York Mellon Corp. , J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and T. Rowe Price Group Inc., who are saying goodbye to "lit" markets, i.e. public exchanges, "and forming a company that will operate a their own "dark pool”...

Given all the hints, promises, guarantees, and bets that have been made, the ECB better deliver quantitative easing on Thursday or the Swissnado from last week will be like a fart in a hurricane. But while most people believe that this time is different and Draghi will actually deliver more than simple rhetoric, investors are sceptical about its ability to actually reflate the eurozone's economy (and rightly so). "We're not learning from the past," warns RBS' Alberto Gallo, noting that "when 'wealth' increases [via QE reflation of markets], only the richest few people benefit," which means the weakest nations like Greece or Italy (who need QE the most) will not feel the benefits.

As Credit Suisse explains "Despite the Fed ending its purchase programme, an ECB sovereign QE would reduce the available share of G3+ sovereign duration (Treasuries, Gilts, JGBs and European Government Debt) for the market to an all-time low. The ECB has the potential to take out up to 5% of G3+ duration of the market if it embarks on a €1 trillion programme. This could keep interest rates globally at very low levels despite a potential Fed policy tightening in 2015 – particularly in the longer end."

"When we see the results of polls like the one below, we realize there is no chance the majority will do anything to reverse the course of America's terminal decline. It will take a complete collapse and bloody reset before we have a chance at putting this country back on a sustainable rational course..."

"My belief is that the big surprise this year is that investor confidence in central banks collapses. And when that happens — I can’t short central banks, although I’d really like to, and the only way to short them is to go long gold, silver and platinum... that’s the only way. That’s something I will do."

An astute reader recently posed an insightful question: we all know who benefits from asset bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate--owners of assets, banks, the government (all those luscious capital gains and rising property taxes), pension funds, brokers and so on. But who benefits from the inevitable collapse of these asset bubbles? If asset bubbles end badly for virtually every participant, then why does the system go to extremes to inflate them? This is an excellent question, as it goes right to the heart of our dysfunctional Status Quo.

The world of investing as we’ve come to know it is over. Financial markets have been distorted to such an extent by the activities, the interventions, of central banks – and governments -, that they can no longer function, period. The difference between the past 6 years and today is that central banks can and will no longer prop up the illusionary world of finance. And that will cause an earthquake, a tsunami and a meteorite hit all in one. If oil can go down the way it has, and copper too, and iron ore, then so can stocks, and your pensions, and everything else.

While Venzuelans line up for hours every day to garner staples such as soap and toilet paper, the Argentinians have a potentially more explosive problem. As Reuters reports, the country's 20.6 million women couldn't find their favorite tampons earlier this month - during the height of summer - "for 20 days, we simply couldn't source any tampons from wholesalers." The government vowed to keep the supply chain filled with tampons as media talk of a "run on tampons" stoked peoples' fears that Argentina is rapildy heading down the same socialist utopia track as its neighbor.