Archive - Mar 2015 - Story

After 30 years of success, the endgame is finally here. We are witnessing a profound secular sea-change: the failure of expanding debt and leverage to lift the real economy of wages and household income. When push comes to shove therefore, you only need one chart to predict the future...

"In light of the data we've received this week – January reports for real consumer spending, construction spending, and net exports that varied from disappointing to downright weak, as well as a softer February print for car sales –-- we are marking down our tracking for annualized real GDP growth in Q1 from 2.5% to 2.0%. Even after this revision risks are more skewed to the downside than upside. By way of comparison, the Atlanta Fed's tracking estimate of Q1 recently came down to 1.2%. It's still relatively early in the quarterly data flow, even so, it is feeling eerily like Q1 of last year. In both cases the quarter began with high expectations, estimates were brought down as the quarter progressed, weather was blamed, but most forecasts remained upbeat on the medium-term outlook."

- JPM

"In September, the Dallas County Commissioners Court nearly approved a contract of its own with Securus that would have explicitly eliminated all in-person visits at the Lew Sterrett Jail in favor of video visitation."

"We propose the following: that large numbers of non-professional inspectors are hired on a strictly short-term, casual basis (no longer than two months, and without any prospect of being rehired) to pose, after some basic The very 'news' that thousands of casual "onlookers" are everywhere, bearing audio and video recording equipment on behalf of the tax authorities, has the capacity to shift attitudes very quickly, spreading a sense of justice across society and engendering a new tax compliance culture - especially if combined with the appropriate communication of the simple message that the time has come for everyone to share the burden of public services and goods."

- Yanis Varoufakis

While America 'believes' it is highly productive, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan instantly dispels that myth in another ominous appearance on CNBC this morning, "American productivity has gone nowhere in the last few years," and that is what is holding back wage growth. Furthermore, reiterating his concerns about the inverse relationship between surging entitlements and weak savings rates, Greenspan noted, "the annual rate of increase in entitlements of 9% per year...and the people that receive it believe they are getting their money back and have a right to it." There simply is no long-term investment as businesses favor short-term actions as the Maestro explains Fed QE lowering the real rate of interest "has been responsible for the rise in P/E multiples... and when rates normalize, that will reverse," adding that "we can't argue that we are extremely overvalued in the marketplace."

The most economically-sensitive commodity is plunging once again. Lumber prices have cratered today to their lowest since June 2013, seemingly tracking the collapse in US Macro data over the last 2 months. First it was Lumber Liquidators, and now the underlying is seeing the biggest weekly drop in six months (and down 5 weeks in a row). As a reminder, the last time lumber and stocks diverged like this... it did not end well...

The ECB’s move to restrict PSPP purchases to sovereign bonds with yields at or above the deposit facility rate (-20bps) has far reaching implications for the German bund curve. Citi's prediction: bunds will be bought until yields converge on -0.20bps.

Following last week's slowing in the pace of rig count, crude prices dropped and then spiked, and it makes today's data under more scrutiny. At around $49.50, WTI prices have round-tripped back almost perfectly to the scene of the crime before today's rig count data hit. The total oil rig count dropped almost 6%, down 75 to 1,192 meaning a re-acceleration of the rig count decline and the 2nd biggest drop since 1993. WTI prices popped on the news and are fading back now...

Janet's direct line..

Gold trading this morning had some oddities. This was more than the normal shenanigans as just before the official release time of 0830ET, gold started to drop then accelerated past the official release time. But... the actual headlines hitting news wires were delayed because of the lack of lock-up and as is clear below, the 'real' selling did not start until those headlines hit. So was this auto-algo selling at 0830 no matter what to ensure markets got the message... or did someone get the unlock-up'd headlines 'earlier' than everyone else?

As the Goldman Apple Industrial Average drops below 18,000, the cash-open bounce in stocks has now been erased and the major US equity indices are making fresh lows. Despite AAPL's gains, the Nasdaq is now red for March and the S&P 500 down 1%...

While the biggest economic event of the week was the US February jobs report, one of the lingering concerns following last week's report that Greece is in financial dire straits, is whether the Eurozone member nation would default on its IMF loan as soon as today when it had a scheduled €310 million payment due to the IMF. Earlier today, in the build up to the NFP report, it was reported that indeed Greece had managed to dig deep under the cushion and find just enough cash to make the required partial loan repayment thus avoiding a technical default.  As Reuters reports, "struggling to scrape together cash and avoid possible default, Athens made a 310 million euro (223.37 million pounds) partial loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund, while Tsipras pleaded to be allowed to issue more short-term debt to plug a funding gap."

A month ago we asked if the "BLS Forget To Count Thousands Of Energy Job Losses" when as we showed, the BLS reported that only 1,900 jobs were lost in the entire oil and gas extraction space, which was a vast underestimation of what is taking place in reality, when compared to not only corporate layoff announcements, but what Challenger had reported was going on in the shale patch, when it calculated that some 21,300 jobs were lost in January in just the energy sector.  Today we ask again: did the BLS once more forget to add the now tens of thousands of jobs lost in the US energy sector? We ask because the divergence is getting, frankly, ridiculous.

5Y Treasury yields have swung 16bps from the immediate post-payrolls reaction trough. Across the entire curve yields are exploding higher and for the first time in 2015, all yields are now higher since the start of the year... 30Y yields are still 24bps lower post-QE3 but 2Y yields are 24bps higher.