Bond

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While the market might have been disappointed by the ECB’s “underdelivery in December, it came as a relief for the Riksbank, the SNB, the Norges Bank, and the Nationalbank who are effectively forced to cut each time the ECB eases or risk seeing upward pressure on their respective currencies. That dynamic has led to a veritable race to the Keynesian bottom with Norway as the last man standing in terms of conducting monetary policy with rates above zero. As we enter the new year, a number of questions remain regarding Europe's headlong plunge into NIRP-dom.

Important pillars of the bull case evaporated throughout 2015. Global price pressures weakened, the global Credit backdrop deteriorated and the global economy decelerated. The huge bets on central bank policies left markets at high risk for abrupt reversals and trade unwinds – 2015 The Year of the Erratic Crowded Trade. Indeed, a global bear market commenced yet most remain bullish. Serious and objective analysts would view this ominously.

The deeper we dig into the story of Dubai's vaporized gold, the more skeletons just tumble out of the closet on what may be the world's biggest gold smuggling ring ever, one involving not just Turkey and Iran, but the mother of all gold smuggling: China itself...

We believe the Credit Cycle has turned and with it will come some massive unexpected shocks. One of these will be the fall out in the Bond Market, centered around the dramatic growth explosion in Bond ETFs coupled with the post financial crisis regulatory changes that effectively removed banks from making markets in corporate bonds.  It is a ‘Witch’s Brew’ with a flattening yield curve bringing it to a boil.

The most important story of 2015 had to have been the junk bond reversal. It is not your typical market behavior; not at all the “wall of worry” that represents healthy skepticism and functional fundamental discounting but rather a “get the hell out of Dodge” and stay out. Not transitory at all, then, rather a paradigm shift that isn’t yet even close to a new steady state. Welcome to 2016.

Earlier in 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he found it difficult to understand what Russia was doing in Syria, since "it does not even border Syria." By that logic, Turkey should not be "doing anything" in the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan or any of the non-bordering lands into which its neo-Ottoman impulses have pushed it.

The latest Chinese company to mysteriously "misplace" its books and as a result be unable to make an upcoming bond payment is China Shanshui Cement: "a former director of Shandong Shanshui, together with a group of gangsters, barged into the Headquarters by force on 27 December 2015, destroyed the properties in the offices therein and assaulted the employees of Shandong Shanshui."

As we move into winter, darkness has fallen up on us. Oil, ca. 65% of the nation’s economy, will not see the required $70 barrel anytime soon. American innovation, once again, turns a scarce resource into an abundant commodity. Despite optimistic Norwegian media articles, the potential for $20 per barrel looms. Production overwhelms demand while inventories rise to record highs. Although, still considered the best place to live, the cracks, in the oil based economy, are forming.

• Oil ends 2015 in downbeat mood; hangover to be long, painful (Reuters)
• Recession, retrenchment, revolution? Impact of low crude prices on oil powers (Guardian)
• Midwest Flooding Might Make the Oil Glut Worse (BBG)
• From Oil Glut to Shortage? Some Say It Could Happen (WSJ)
• Ten Years After Blowup, Amaranth Investors Waiting to Get Money Back (WSJ)
• China Fires a Warning Shot at Yuan Speculators With Bank Bans (BBG)

It has come down to this: a year in which the US stock market (led by a handful of shares even as the vast majority of stocks has dropped) has gone nowhere, but took the longest and most volatile path to get there, is about to close either red or green for 2015 based on what happens in today's low-volume session following yesterday's unexpected last half hour of trading "air pocket" which brought the S&P back to unchanged for the year.

Perhaps mom and pop investors should show the following chart to their financial advisors, who directly or indirectly work for these institutions, and ask them: why should they be buying, when the counterparty they are buying from is, most likely, this very same financial advisor?

The prospect that the leaders of our monetary politburo are about to be tarred and feathered by economic reality might be satisfying enough if it led to the repudiation of Keynesian central planning and a thorough housecleaning at the Fed. Unfortunately, it will also mean that tens of millions of retail investors and 401k holders will be taken to the slaughterhouse for the third time this century. And this time the Fed is out of dry powder, meaning retail investors will never recover as they did after 2002 and 2009.

As oil prices wallow near multi-year lows, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the new cartel controlling oil prices is not OPEC but world credit markets. From Saudi Arabia’s record $100 billion deficit to shale oil’s continuing reliance on cheap credit funding, it’s clear that no major oil producer or company in the world right now is economically self-sufficient based on oil revenues alone. This situation has left the flow of oil and the decision on when to stop pumping the increasingly tarnished black gold in the hands of banks rather than oil men.