Archive - Sep 5, 2015 - Story

The first change often occurs below the surface. The deterioration of the market’s internals typically occurs in the lead-up and development of a cyclical market top, but this dynamic too can persist for an extended period. However, eventually these divergences reach a head, and the most egregious cases have historically occurred within close proximity to major, cyclical market tops. The deterioration of the broader market is so great that the resultant foundation of support below the surface of the popular market cap-weighted averages is nearly non-existent. Once the relatively few leaders propping up the market begin to collapse under the weight, the inevitable cyclical decline can commence.

Amid the carnage and chaos of the last two weeks, one thing has become crystal clear - the effect of massive one-way bets on 'everything', predicated on the omnipotence of central bankers, has left a market (stocks, bonds, FX, commodities) bereft of fundamental linkages and instead driven entirely by technicals (flows, forced unwinds, systematic gamma). While many 'records' were broken in terms of velocity of moves, it is the VIX complex that seems to have suffered most, and as the following chart shows, positioning is now at an extreme in both stocks, vol, and bonds once again.

There is no better way to describe the international monetary system today than through the statement made in 1971 by U.S. Treasury Secretary, John Connally. He said to his counterparts during a Rome G-10 meeting in November 1971, shortly after the Nixon administration ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold and shifted the international monetary system into a global floating exchange rate regime that, "The dollar is our currency, but your problem.” This remains the U.S. policy towards the international community even today. On several occasions both the past and present chairpersons of the Fed, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, have indicated it still is the U.S. policy as it concerns the dollar. Is China saying to the world, but more particularly to the U.S., “The yuan is our currency but your problem”?

If one considers that the next major interest rate manipulation by the Fed appears to hinge on a notoriously unreliable report about a lagging economic indicator, it should immediately become clear on what a flimsy foundation modern central economic planning rests. How much more ridiculous can it possibly get? Incidentally, it also serves to demonstrate how far off the reservation economists have veered in their desperate and laughable attempts to transform economics into a discipline akin to the natural sciences.