Bank of America

Zero Hedge has been following the topic of Chinese FX reserves, and specifically their change over time, with great interest, as this (presumably) primarily dollar-denominated amount is the critical "dry powder" that our key foreign purchaser of Bonds, Notes and Bills uses when bidding on Treasury Auctions. Should China's FX reserves decline, or be forcibly diversified, the amount left over for UST purchases will be correspondingly less at a time when every UST auction could be the last should PDs, Indirect and Direct bidders not have enough bidding interest to cover growing supply. As China is very secretive about the composition of its FX reserve portfolio, there is usually a lot of guess work involved in tracking where and how the money flows. What we do know, according to a January 15th report by People's Bank of China (PBOC), is that in 2009 FX reserves increased by $453.1 billion to a total of $2.399 trillion... Or so we thought. Yesterday China's official State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) released an update on FX reserves, according to which FX reserves increased... by only $382.1 billion, a $71 billion differential from the PBOC's number.

TheStreet.com has dug up a very interesting email that shows what goes behind closed doors when the heads of two of the largest US and Spanish banks get together and talk. Not all of it appears to be legal – there may be collusion and an agreement not to compete for acquisitions.

2010 is not proving to be an auspicious start for the Paulson & Co. multi-billionaire (or any other hedge fund manager for that matter). Bloomberg has disclosed that John Paulson's recently launched gold fund has dropped 14% in January. Hopefully massive long exposure in Bank of America stock (anecdotally, and somewhat imprudently, unhedged with CDS) has made up for the disappointing beginning.

Spreads were mixed in the US with IG worse, HVOL improving, ExHVOL weaker, and HY selling off. IG trades 9.1bps wide (cheap) to its 50d moving average, which is a Z-Score of 1.1s.d.. At 99.75bps, IG has closed tighter on 72 days in the last 283 trading days (JAN09). The last five days have seen IG flat to its 50d moving average. Indices typically underperformed single-names with skews widening in general as IG's skew widened as it underperformed, HVOL outperformed but widened the skew, ExHVOL's skew widened as it underperformed, HY's skew widened as it underperformed. 50.4% of names in IG moved more than their historical vol would imply as higher vol names underperformed lower vol names by 6.01% to 4.74%. IG's vol is around 4.38% per 1 day period, which leaves 97 names higher vol and 28 lower vol than the index.

Charlie Gasparino over at the Daily Beast points out a new development in the neverending Ken Lewis saga, which if true, may mark the beginning of the end of the pristine image of Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson: "In defending former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis against charges that he misled investors, his lawyers will call as witnesses former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, according to people close to the matter." We hope the AG will take advantage of this opportunity to pursue justice, and expose the former Treasury Secretary and the just reconfirmed Fed Chairman who will under oath, be revealed as the true masterminds in this illegal operation.

The Syndicate Encouraging Corruption lately has been far more busy begging for money from the Tim Geithner's gargantuan budget than performing any enforcement, analysis, or regulation, case in point today's second attempt to kill any investigation into the ML/BAC merger. We hope some Congressional or Senate committee will finally find the guts to subpoena any and all communication between BACML, or any other banks, and the SEC related to this proposed settlement, to uncover just what the SEC's motives are to fast-lane yet another case involving the endless corruption on Wall Street. Luckily Cuomo is still there to pursue the punishment of real wrongdoing, since America is now completely unable to rely on the $1 billion publicly funded organization, which, at least on paper, "works in American investors' interest"... and by American investors we assume the agency does not refer to Goldman Sachs or Bank Of America. Yet judgment day for Mary Schapiro may soon be coming. Larry Doyle at Sense on Cents notes that next week FINRA's board of directors will finally address alleged wrongdoings by Schapiro. We join Larry in asking: "Will the Board realize it ultimately needs to be accountable to ALL its member firms and, by extension, to the American public at large? Will the Obama administration compel the Board to provide the transparency America so badly wants?"

In short, in the process of acquiring Merrill, the Bank’s management misled its shareholders, the public, its board and its lawyers by concealing Merrill’s disastrous fourth quarter financial results in order to secure the shareholders’ uninformed approval of the deal. The Bank’s management then salvaged this potentially crippling situation by extracting billions in taxpayer bailouts by misleading the federal government. They did this, in part, by threatening federal officials that they would terminate the Merger Agreement based on a material adverse change—virtually the same material change they failed to disclosed to their shareholders prior to the vote. This action seeks redress under New York’s Martin Act for this conduct. - Andrew Cuomo

• Quants ideas sink market, cause ruin (Bloomberg)
• Norges Bank keeps policy rate on hold at 1.75%, Krone drops (Norges Bank)
• Almunia endorses some imgainary plan according to which Greece "promises" to cut its budget (Bloomberg, and Bloomberg)
• This should come as no surprise to anyone at this point: Turn On, Tune Out, Drop Out: CNBC ratings get smashed (Wall St. Cheat Sheet)
• Greece rattled by hidden debt controversy (Telegraph)
• AIG Set to pay $100 million in bonuses this week (WSJ)
• Bank of America to pay average banker bonus of $400,000 (Bloomberg)

In the past Zero Hedge had respect for Ten. Senator Bob Corker due to his opposition to the nationalization of the bankrupt automakers and making them yet another ward of the ever larger central-planning state. However, after today's hearing with Paul Volcker on the Prop trading ban, any respect we may have had for the Senator has promptly dissipated. While we understand that the pointless bashing of Volcker's proposal by Corker was predicated by his sizable lobby interest (over $21 million raised in the course of his career) and his talking points were undoubtedly a transliteration of a memorandum submitted by one of the Too Big To Fail banks that stand to experience substantial losses should the Volcker proposal pass, one line of argument in Corker's speech that is flagrantly flawed was Corker's naive rhetorical question whether there has been a single instance during the financial crisis where a commercial bank engaging in proprietary trading led directly to that institution failing or having to be bailed out by the taxpayer. Corker assumed the answer is no and kept pouncing on that answer. Well, Senator, you are wrong - meet Merrill Lynch, incidentally one of your biggest financial backers. Also, please meet Merrill's prop basis trade and its prop HVOL4 trade, which combined were the primary reason for the firm's $15 billion writedown in Q4 of 2008 and the subsequent bail out of the firm by Bank of America.

Spreads were tighter in the US as all the indices improved (albeit marginally). IG trades 3.9bps wide (cheap) to its 50d moving average, which is a Z-Score of 0.4s.d. (and HY has now traded wide of its 50-day for 2 days). At 95bps, IG has closed tighter on 36 days in the last 280 trading days (JAN09). The last five days have seen IG flat to its 50d moving average.

Even as ever more Congressmen express concern about the implications of the ongoing CRE "bubble" (yes, this is a quote), S&P comes out with a report noting that should the banking system be forced to take all appropriate CRE-associated writedowns, it likely would not survive. And all this is occurring as REITs probe new 52 week highs. Welcome to the new economy.

In response to several reader inquiries into the Bank Of America report behind the post highlighting the potential outcomes for the Greek nation, we present this simplified summary matrix from BofA that rates the probability of each possible scenario and the implications that would follow as a result. A useful cheat sheet for those sovereign default situations.

With the euro having dropped substantially from a high of around $1.51 to less than $1.40 in the span of a few short months, it has sent gold buyers looking for cover, mostly as a function of the linear (and at times sigmoidal) inverse correlation between gold prices and the DXY which throughout 2009 has held surprisingly strong. Yet will a dollar scramble prove that the recent flight to gold has been premature? BofA believes that while the near-term implications for gold are as of yet undecided, relying on both € (bearish) and risk (bullish) signals, the long-term drivers for gold should be price supportive, especially for EUR-based investors. Proper positioning can be adopted using OTM gold calls, which are not only no longer as rich as they were a mere month ago, but would benefit substantially should Greece indeed follow through with an actual default and result in a flaring of all risk indicators, further precipitating a flight to euro alternatives, among which the dollar, and gold, are dominant.

The SIGTARP has been busy - a 224 page report just released provides an update of his activity to date, and covers everything from the ongoing investigation into whether the closure of Chrysler dealers was politically motivated, to the SEC's complete humiliation in regard to the BofA-ML settlement, to the dismal permanent modification rate in the HAMP program, to the firing of alleged sex-tape fiend Jeff Gundlach, to how the Fed is the New Century of the new decade.

In his first State of the Union speech in 2010, President Barack Obama carefully chose his words in calling for a new jobs bill to stimulate real organic economic growth. However, politicians have always been extremely deft about making speeches that present a united front with the people against corruption, while often hammering out legislation behind closed doors that ensures no real change will ever occur. To determine if the wool is being pulled over our eyes once again, let’s turn to the actual text of President Obama’s State of the Union speech.