Archive - Dec 22, 2015 - Story

It's grim up north... and getting grimmer. Amid soaring suicide rates, Canada's once-booming oil patch is rapidly accelerating its downward trajectory. "Canadians should be concerned in times like these," warned Tim McMillan, president and chief executive of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, noting that the oil and gas sector will see 100,000 job losses by the end of this year. Apart from the protracted price declines, Alberta’s oil and gas sector has also had to contend with a 20 per cent hike in corporate taxes, increased provincial royalties, a carbon tax and new regulatory policies to limit rein in carbon emissions... and now a new competitot from US exports.

2015 has witnessed several events that had, and will have, negative repercussions on individual freedom. Orwellian totalitarianism is increasingly creeping into our everyday lives. How much more intrusive will the violations of our liberties become and for how long will the establishment get away with this? With regards to the financial system, no real solution was found to issues such as those in the euro zone. Furthermore, the financial system as a whole once again got deeper into debt. For how much longer can central banks and governments continue kicking the can down the road without any real reform?

Timing a crash can be a fool's errand, and fortunately such efforts are largely irrelevant if you are tail hedging (though they are quite relevant if you aren't). But this doesn't mean that exercises in timing are without merit. Without a doubt (or at least with over 99% confidence), bad things happen with increasing expectation when conditioning on higher Q ratios ex ante. Factoring time into the equation, and again based on history, the confidence interval around the median time would point to an expectation that the crash should commence right about now.

From the fringe, for birdie...

Following last week's huge build reported by DOE, crude inventories reported by API tonight dropped 3.6 million barrels (drastically different from the 2.3mm build expected). WTI is rallying on the news, despite a 1.5 million barrel build at Cushing (up notably from last week's 847k) - the 7th weekly build in a row.

At 108 four-year colleges, at least half of all students hadn’t paid even $1 of what they owe within three years of leaving college. Those colleges got more than $10 billion in federal student loans and grants last year.

"These people, I hate some of these people. But I would never kill them." 

“I know where she went. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s disgusting."

Update: just minutes after the WPIX report, the WNBC chief investigative reporter Jonathan Dienst said that there is no new specific threat to New York City.

A “credible threat” has been lodged against New York City, days ahead of Christmas and during an especially busy time of the year when tourists flock to the Big Apple, law enforcement sources told PIX11 News Tuesday.

With the market now back to oversold conditions and redemptions complete, it is now or never for the traditional “Santa Rally.” Statistically speaking, the odds are high that the market will muster a rally over the next couple of weeks. While the short-term trends are indeed still bullishly-biased, the longer-term analysis (monthly) reveals a more dangerous picture emerging.

"The last straw was the amount of food the Americans provided – 200 pounds of rice and 200 pounds of kidney beans, enough for each of the course graduates for a week or two, but not for their families, who are in dire financial straits. That’s when the group voted to take two weeks off."

The first Fed rate hike in seven years was supposed to trigger a powerful equity rally as the bulls expected money to pour out of bonds into stocks; especially into the cyclicals. Unfortunately for the equity bulls,, as Mizuho's Steve Ricchiuto notes, this time things are different and instead of the Fed rate hike triggering the traditional Santa Claus rally; it looks like the FOMC is actually the Grinch. The key message delivered by the Fed though the SEP, the DOTS and the Chair’s post meeting press conference is that this is the best the economy is going to get.

Needless to say, these names are just the beginning: once the redemptions - and gating - genie is out of the bottle, there is no putting it back.

Without being able to predict the election outcome in 2016, it will be prudent to keep cash levels high in order to maintain flexibility. Furthermore with the leading beta asset classes starting to exhibit corrections, there are growing signs that the investing environment is changing, which should give investors pause.

Since our Keynesian central bankers have no clue that their prodigious money printing resulted in the drastic underpricing of credit and capital over the course of the past two decades, they are flying blind. They simply fail to see that the global economy is now swamped in more excess capacity than at any time since the 1930s, and probably even then. So they keep expecting the commodity cycle to momentarily bottom and prices to rebound, thereby reflating CapEx and household spending.