Archive - Oct 21, 2015 - Story

America is not Greece, but judging from the Obama administration's just-unveiled plans to bailout Puerto Rico's disastrous debt situation, the American territory may have to sacrifice a little more sovereignty to get some relief. Obama is pressing for Congress to give Puerto Rico (PR) sweeping powers to reduce its $73 billion debt burden through a form of bankruptcy protection not now available to American territories and will also ask lawmakers to establish an independent body to monitor the island’s fiscal affairs (a la Troika).

"The United States is in decline. While not all major shocks to the system will be devastating, when the right one comes along, the outcome may be dramatic." Once upon a time America fought a great war to rid the world of the Nazis, but now we have become just like them.

"We all need to be prepared... That's not new for LA."

Tomorrow morning Mario Draghi is widely expected to if not announce an extension, or expansion, of the ECB's QE program, than to at least jawbone sufficiently, and push the EURUSD lower from its recently anchored level in the 1.10-1.20 range. But what are the specifics of Draghi's announcement: will he merely expand the monetization limit per security, as he did in early September, will he increase the universe of eligibile securities, or will he simply extend the maturity of the non-open ended QE from September 2016 to some indefinite date? The following list, courtesy of Bloomberg, summarizes what the sellside universe believes Draghi will unveil in just under 12 hours.

After last night's bloodbathery in China, analysts and officials are out en masse to ensure a newly re-leveraged Chinese investors that the "stock plunge is a normal correction." Disappointingly, Chinese stocks are barely bouncing at the open, which is not what we can say for Japan, where the mysterious uneconomic panic-buyer-of-first-resort appeared once again and smashed the Nikkei 225 200 points higher at the open (after weakness in the US).

Much like the NBS will obscure any weakness below 7% in China’s GDP data, the PBoC will do “whatever it takes” (central bank pun fully intended) to make sure the market doesn’t get wind of the fact that there’s still a tremendous amount of pressure in terms of capital outflows. As Bloomberg reports, "The People’s Bank of China and local lenders increased their holdings in onshore forwards to $67.9 billion in August, positions that would boost China’s currency against the dollar. The amount is five times more than the average in the first seven months."

Paul Volcker announced his intention to squeeze inflation out of the system soon after he became Fed chairman. Too bad he didn’t save a better system. Not many men can resist the appeal of free money. Americans proved they were no better at it than others. Falling interest rates and the paper dollar gave them a way to impoverish themselves – by spending money they hadn’t earned. They took the opportunity offered to them. They borrowed and spent... and drove the entire world forward at a furious pace. But now that stage is over.

"It's Russia’s way of saying he is in our pocket, he is our asset and we will decide whether to keep him. This is for sure a preparation for a deal and one more attempt by the Russians to embolden their bargaining position. The message to the world is that Russia solves problems and you don’t. If you want to solve problems, work with us.”

The "very serious people" are starting to get nervous, because while most other "commodities" have seen their prices plummet in the biggest crash since Lehman, gold just went green for the year. Enter Goldman Sachs: "While our base case remains for higher US real rates and lower gold prices, there are significant risks that our forecast for gold price weakness is pushed out, should the Fed surprise us and remain on hold in December."

The Founding Fathers of the United States revolted over taxation without representation. We are back to that now, for we are being taxed to pay interest to service debts from the last two generations. We had no right to vote on that spending, which took place before we were born. This is not a democratic process.

Today’s task for the Republican establishment... Between now and March, they must settle on a candidate, hope his rivals get out of the race, defeat Trump in one of the first two contests, or effect his defeat by someone like Carson, then pray Trump will collapse like a house of cards. The improbabilities of accomplishing this grow by the week, and will soon start looking, increasingly, like an impossibility - absent the kind of celestial intervention that marked the career of the late Calvin Coolidge.

We have ceased to live in a free market economy a long time ago. The only sector of the economy that has managed to remain relatively free in many ways is the technology sector, because it innovates so rapidly that it tends to stay a step or two ahead of politicians and the oligarchies giving them their orders. They simply cannot catch up quickly enough with regulating all these innovations to death. Lately technology has begun to invade the turf of a number of established service businesses... and that appears to be a problem for the crony 'capitalist' crowd.

If you’re looking to close on an M&A deal, now might be the time to do it before the cost of capital starts to rise. Sure, “liftoff” might have been delayed by a month (or 12) but you have to do your due diligence and make sure there are enough synergies to make it worth everyone’s time and effort. We suppose that helps to explain why, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, ISIS and al-Qaeda are contemplating a merger in the face of, how shall we say, “new entrants” in the race for Syrian market share.

"What difference does it make though..."