Bond

And so the Illinois pension bomb has been kicked down the street for another few months. The state just priced its delayed $3.7 billion bond courtesy of a plethora of International Wealth Funds. As the WSJ reported earlier "Initial indications on the deal Tuesday showed $6.1 billion in orders, with around a fifth of those coming from international investors, such as sovereign-wealth funds and insurance companies, one market participant said." The use of proceeds, as reported previously, is to fund payments to state employee pension funds. In other words, Illinois pensioners are now on the hook to the periodic generosity of bondholders to make sure there is enough money in the pot to fund their retirement.

Meanwhile, not letting any parabolic blow off in silver crisis go to waste, the Criminal Reserve and the Criminal Dealers engaged in another gang rape of whatever is left of the US middle class. Today's POMO, which closed with $6.688 billion of 3 year bonds getting monetized (at a whopping 5.6x Submitted/Accepted ratio), basically consisted of just two cusips: the 912828PQ7 and the 912828QH6. Of these two, QH6 represented $5.285 billion or 80% of the entire POMO. Why is this interesting? Because this CUSIP was auctioned off ten days ago, with an actual issuance date of February 15. That's Tuesday. The Fed just monetized bonds that were eligible for trading for a whopping 3 days! The daylight robbery, and the PD fringe benefits, continue as nobody apparently has the guts or half the brain to understand just how criminal this set up is. Luckily, everyone will magically, and very retroactively "know" just how ominous this now daily occurrence was after the next and last crash.

Can the ECB outspend the Bond Markets? Is Portugal truly Insolvent? Will they default? What happens to rate sensitive assets that are already at depression levels, such as real estate, when rates spike world wide? Why am I asking questions that everybody already knows the answer to???? Well, just in case, here go those answers anyway.

Just in case someone fell for Van Rompuy's earlier joke that "the euro is a stable currency with strong fundamentals", and/or was wondering what the reason for repeating this particular lie once again was (now if we was talking about the CHF, we would certainly believe him), look no further than Portugal. The one story that nobody continues to talk about, and which will come to a head in less than 2 weeks, as Knight Capital made clear previously, continues to get little coverage, and despite hopes and dreams of some miraculous EFSF rescue mechanism (which will prove woefully inadequate once the chips start falling), spreads are leaking. Oddly enough, the ECB has not stepped in yet to shovel another €1 billion worth of decomposing sovereign bonds under the European rug. Perhaps it is time to refresh on that huge surge in borrowings under the Marginal Lending Facility, and for someone at the ECB to explain just why and how this happened.

There is a real sense of the “calm before the storm” in markets globally. Complacency reigns, despite signs that the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is deepening and that Japanese and US bond markets also look very vulnerable due to rising inflation, very large deficits and massive public debt. US Treasuries have been sold by some of the largest investors (both private and sovereign) in the world recently (see news). These include large creditor nations Russia and China but also PIMCO, the largest bond fund in the world. A global sovereign debt crisis is now quite possible. At the very least, we are likely to have a long period of rising interest rates which will depress economic growth. Contrary to some misguided commentary, rising interest rates will benefit gold as was seen when interest rates rose sharply in the 1970s. It was only towards the end of the interest rate tightening cycle in 1980, when interest rates were higher than inflation, that gold prices began to fall.

No, snow was not blamed in this latest, and certainly not last, broke state snafu. But wait until you read the official excuse...

It has been a few weeks since the last attempt to extend the Build America Bonds program, even as muni bond prices continue to stagnate. Which means it is time for another valiant try, this time possibly using the post-revolutionary chaos in Egypt as a smoke screen. Bond Buyer reports that Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., has introduced a bill extending the Build America Bond program through 2012 at subsidy rates of 32% in 2011 and 31% in 2012. Since we are certain that Bill Gross is lobbying about as hard as one can to get this bill passed due to his massive latent muni exposure, this last ditch attempt to subsidize the muni market just could pass. If it doesn't, that could be the bottom of the muni market.

Trust the Criminal Reserve and Criminary Dealers to take advantage of the cover provided by the Egyptian revolution to sneak a quick Flip That Bond in there. Today's POMO closed with $7.375 billion of bonds monetized out of $24 billion in submitted offers. The Submitted to Accepted ratio was 3.3x, but as usual the trickery lies just below the surface. As usual the just issued bond, the 2.625% of 2018, accounted for the bulk of the POMO. In fact, at $3.899 billion, the PT1 represented 52.9% of the entire POMO. With PDs having taken down $12.2 billion of the issue at auction, they have just reduced their holdings by 32%. But wait, there's more: on the February 3 POMO PDs put back $5.2 billion of the PT1 CUSIP. So between today and the last time the 7 Year bond (which was just auctioned off two weeks ago) was monetized, Primary Dealers have already given back 75% of the entire take down from the January 27 auction! So while Egypt has just turned a new page in its history, things in the US continue grinding just along the good old and very predictable "rape the middle class" status quo.

Gold, and particularly silver, lease rates (see chart) have been rising recently. The rate is found by subtracting the silver forward offered rate from the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). This likely signals increasing tightness and illiquidity in the bullion markets (as recently said by Sprott Asset Management, and UBS yesterday). The rise in silver has been very sharp, having gone from 4.29 basis points (0.0429%) to 77.65 basis points (0.7765%) since the start of the year (31 December 2010). While the rise is very sharp, it is important to put it in context, and silver lease rates remain well below the levels reached after the Lehman Brothers systemic crisis in late 2008 when silver lease rates surged to 2.5%. At the same time, the very small silver bullion market is clearly under strain as seen in the continuing backwardation. This clearly shows that demand for physical is robust, evident from retail demand in the US where there were record US Mint silver eagle sales last month. There are delays (3 to 4 weeks) to get branded LBMA silver bars (100 oz) in volume.

With all the discussion over how "stable" Europe is in the past month, one might actually take the European bankercrats' word at face value. And nothing could be more hazardous to one's health than believing a corpulent gentleman from Brussels. Because while Herman Van Rompuy is literally sending out haikus via twitter, his continent continues to burn. Today, the Portuguese 10 year hit a fresh lifetime high yield (and low price for those who failed bond math 101). One would think that with virtually everything backstopped by the ECB, Europe would show at least some resiliency. No such luck. In fact, things are getting progressively worse as Germany continues to procrastinate on the one decision that has any hope of being at least a stop-gap interim solution, namely a united bond issuance authority. Instead, Europe continues to go all in on its failed EFSF contraption which will work for a few months, and then will have to be bailed out with an even bigger CDO: an EFSF³? The only question around this time is who is indicating (wink) that they are long the equity tranche? As for Portugal's completely non-viable interest rate: just close your eyes and stick your hand in the sand. Trust Bernanke- it works for him (and he is a Ph.D.).

The Criminal Reserve once again lives up to its name...

Claims that total defaults in the municipal bond market could reach $100 billion are vastly exaggerated. Teachers will starve, police and firemen will go on strike, and there will be rioting in the streets before a single interest payment is missed to bond holders. Defaults will rise, but it will be from two to only 20, not the hundreds that Whitney is forecasting. Have I seen This movie before?

Just in case you were expecting a full recovery on those Greek bonds stashed away under the mattress (ahem ASSGEN) here comes Euro Intelligence to spoil your day (and maybe, just maybe, wreak some havoc with your CDS). In a nuthsell: we are about to see a Brady plan with 35% haircuts. If true, we may be seeing some pretty interesting unintended consequences in the near to very near-term future.

In today's episode of "Flip That Bond", the Primary Dealers succeeded in flipping a whopping 26% of the just auctioned off 1% of 1/25/2014 (912828PQ7) back to the Fed. Today's POMO has closed with $7.720 billion in bonds maturing between 2013 and 2014 monetized by Sack Frost, of which, and this should come as no surprise to anyone, the bond most put back to the FRBNY, to the tune of $3.7 billion or 48% of all, was PQ7. Keep in mind that the PD take down in this bond was $14.2 billion. Just two weeks later the Primary Dealers have reduced their positions in this most recent auction by 26%. In other news, there is no monetization. And Tim Jeethner pays his taxes.

The Fed's blatant "Flip That Bond" criminal reality show, funded entirely by you, dear taxpayer, continues, and is in fact accelerating. Over the weekend we provided a list of the 10 cheapest bonds that the Fed should monetize based on their relative position on the spline, in terms of cheapness/richness (link) and implied that should the Fed veer away from this list, it would be engaging in what is certainly non-fiduciary activity, by merely facilitating taxpayer rape on behalf of the Primary Dealers who "put" to Sack Frost whatever issue they want, and certainly not the cheapest ones to be monetized by the US taxpayers (i.e., an act that would at least pretend to save some money). Specifically, we said: "The just auctioned off 2.75% of 12/31/2017  is not even among the top 10 cheapest bonds, which means that if on Monday the PN4 makes up for a material percentage of the $7-9 billion buyback, then something is very, very wrong." Well, one look at the final completion list of Today's POMO indicates that it is preciseley the just auctioned off PN4 due 12/31/2017 that made up over half of the entire bloody operation! At 4.551 billion (out of a total $8.869 billion in bonds monetized), the Fed actively conspired with PDs to defraud taxpayers by engaging in monetization not of bonds that were cheapest and thus bonds the Fed should have been buying, but merely was taking the other side of the trade in today's version of "Flip That Bond." And so the criminality continues unabated.