Archive - Oct 2015 - Story

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney smiled and repeatedly said, "Nice to see you," when asked if he had any concerns about the Saudi Arabian-led bombing campaign in Yemen.

"It is not a problem of liquidity, but of fundamentals"...

For the 6th week in a row, Baker Hughes reports a decline in US oil rig counts. With a huge 29 rig drop - the largest in over 5 months - the total oil rig count is 809, the lowest since May 2002. The reaction is a stick-save buying panic surging crude into the green on the day.

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

Another day, another stock-stop-running VIX "fat-finger" flash-crash to get the S&P into confidence-inspiring green territory...

And so the "most important payrolls number" at least until the October FOMC meeting when the Fed will once again do nothing because suddenly the US is staring recession in the face, is in the history books, and as previewed earlier today, at 142K it was a total disaster, 60K below the consensus and below the lowest estimate. Just as bad, the August print was also revised far lower from 173K to 136K. And while it is less followed, the household survey was an unmitigated disaster, with 236,000 jobs lost in September.

Since the start of the depression in December 2007, the US economy has added 1.5 million waiters and bartenders and lost 1.4 million manufacturing workers.

Ignore the fact that today's jobs data printed below the lowest of all economists' estimates, and just buy... because USDJPY is surging. As one market participant exclaimed "this is the most aggressive buying [in S&P minis] I have ever seen."

A Hillary Clinton staffer planted questions in a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, according to email records released this week. At the time of the interview in early 2011, Assange had already leaked sensitive, embarrassing information from the State Department. The unclassified staff email to Clinton, released amid her ongoing email scandal, demonstrates not only that the former Secretary of State and her staff were out to discredit Assange, but that the government manipulates media and wields heavy influence over it.

Precious metals are angrily bid this morning (even as copper and crude tumble) after the dismal US jobs data sent the USD reeling and raised expectations for moar QE down the line. Silver is up 5% on the day - the biggest daily jump since Dec 1st 2014 and gold is up 2.2% - its best day since April.

Guess who: “CLAIMS” AND NONFARM PAYROLLS: It’s A Very “Tidy” Correlation Indeed: This wonderful chart, courtesy of TD Securities, shows how almost perfectly jobless claims and non?farm payrolls correlate, and so with “claims” falling as they have, payrolls today could be surprisingly high."

In addition to the Fed's credibility, one other privately-controlled organization that has seen its credibility completely crushed in recent months is the Goldman economic forecasting team (if not the team that "forecasts" Fed monetary policy, simply because Goldman controls the Fed and tells it what to do; as such what Goldman "thinks" the Fed will do is usually ironclad) whose Jan Hatzius "for what it's worth" forecast above trend growth for the US economy in 2014.  So, "for what it's worth", here is Goldman jobs report post-mortem (in a parallel report Goldman just cut its Q3 GDP forecast from 2.0% to 1.9%), in which the bank admits that the report was a disaster, and that as a result "we now see action at the December meeting as a close call."

In business, the 80/20 rule states that 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers. In an economy that is more than 2/3rds driven by consumption, such an imbalance of the "have" and "have not's" impedes real economic growth.

Bloodbath for a near record short net Treasury speculative position as rate-hike odds collapse and the entire UST curve plunges. The belly is collapsing 13-15bps (biggest drop in 5Y and 7Y yields since January) and the long-end is dropping significantly.  Between the 10Y highs of 2.0597% and lows of 1.9022%, the drop was 15.75bp - that is the biggest intraday drop since Sep 18, 2013, the day the Fed did not Taper. All yields are now lower on the year with 5Y near 2015 lows (down 42bps since end-Dec).