Bear Stearns

Just two days ago we warned of the dramatic disconnect between equity insurance and credit insurance markets - at levels last seen before Bear Stearns collapse. As the Yuan devaluation shuddered EURCNH carry traders and battered European assets, US equity markets stumbled onwards and upwards, impregnable in their fortitude with The Fed at their back no matter what. However, US corporate bond markets were a bloodbath...

One of the most disturbing and recurring themes highlighted on this site over the past year has been the ever greater disconnect between the worlds of equity and fixed income, whether in terms of implied volatility, or actual underlying risk.  It turns out there is be an even more acute, and far more concering divergence, which was conveniently pointed out overnight by Bank of America and which suggests that a Bear Stearns type event may be just a few days ahead.

Some downward risk to the gold price remains due to the momentum of the recent severe correction in price. He points out that GoldCore had suggested on Bloomberg three years ago that a 50% correction in price was not unlikely at that time as is normal in long term bull markets.

Hyperinflation in the U.S. is coming sometime in the next 20 years or so, and this isn't a cry from a Chicken Little, but a conclusion that the analysis strongly suggests. It is possible hyperinflation could happen during the next few years, but that seems unlikely since it would require a series of major crises and political blunders – events unprecedented in the history of the United States. If this led to a corruption of Constitutional rights in the midst of an exaltation of the Executive Branch that resulted in loss of the rule of law, hyperinflation might result. It is much more probable that hyperinflation will be preceded by a long slow decline that will include a protracted period of high inflation, and that the crash of the dollar and hyperinflation will be the final tumble off a looming, steep cliff.

"With this brewing crisis around Greece, the fact the Shanghai stock market is exposing all kinds of uncomfortable truths about China, (for instance, the lack of competitiveness, overleverage, massive over-expectations in valuations, the failure of the stock market as “bread and circuses” for the middle classes, and the fears of the party at a troublesome time), and the big bond reversal in the last quarter… and its perhaps surprising that things aren’t a whole lot worse. It’s no wonder global commodity markets are flimsier than a chocolate tea-pot. The first half of the year was pretty torrid… but it could still prove pleasant  compared to what may be coming. I’m wondering if Global Markets are poised on the edge of the precipice about to take a step forward?"

The rescue of AIG should not serve as a source of comfort to investors.

Nobody apparently learned much from the whole bubble-bust affair as banks and financial firms are at it again, this time in corporate debt. The artificial suppression of default, in no small part to perceptions of those bank reserves under QE (just like perceptions of balance sheet capacity pre-crisis), has turned junk debt into the vehicle of choice for yet another cycle of “reach for yield.” In the past two bubble cycles, we see how monetary policy creates the conditions for them but also in parallel for their disorderly closure. It isn’t money that the FOMC directs but rather unrealistic, to the extreme, expectations and extrapolations. Once those become encoded in financial equations, the illusion becomes real supply.

It’s happening. As expected, dynastic politics is prevailing in campaign 2016. After a tease about as long as Hillary’s, Jeb Bush (aka Jeb!) officially announced his presidential bid last week. Ultimately, the two of them will fight it out for the White House, while the nation’s wealthiest influencers will back their ludicrously expensive gambit. And here’s a hint: don’t bet on Jeb not to make it through the Republican gauntlet of 12 candidates (so far). After all, the really big money’s behind him.

And it started off all so well: the market, blissfully ignoring what we wrote just yesterday in Why The IMF Will Reject The Latest Greek Proposal In Just Two Numbers, was in full blown levitation mode overnight when it sent Japanese stocks to their highest close since 1996 (pre dot com) and with the Chinese central bank doing its best to keep levitating local stocks away from the abyss, pushing the SHCOMP up another 2.5%. Euro Stoxx 50 went from flat to down 1% and is bouncing. As BBG's Richard Breslow adds, predictably, the market is taking this as a ploy, not an end game. Of course, this is precisely the "Bear Stearns is fine" conventional wisdom that Cramer was spewing days before Bear failed because nobody could fathom how anyone can conceive of a worst case scenario. Only it isn't nobody: we reported before of a Goldman's "Conspiracy Theory" Stunner: A Greek Default Is Precisely What The ECB Wants. 

With The IMF (and Germany to a less extent) apparently peeing in the Greek Deal pool, perhaps it is worth considering what happens next if this "Greece is rescued" deal is not done. Who can save Greece? Who will pay The IMF? Why, that's simple, the good ol' American taxpayer thanks to The Fed's lifeline...

Approximately two years ago, a commentary was published entitled “The One Bank”. The empirical foundation for the article (and the paradigm) was an extensive computer model, produced by a trio of academics at a university in Switzerland, and originally reviewed in an article from Forbes.

Is Deustche Bank the next Lehman is likely the wrong question to be asking. Is Lehman the template for European banking may be more to the point. Take it from the guy that called the Lehman debacle 5 months before the fact.

We should not even want to rebuild the world as it was in the decade of the 2000’s because it was so unbelievably unstable, a fact revealed persistently in the nearly eight years since that peak. Economists and central bankers treated the Panic of 2008 and the Great Recession as if it were a temporary interruption in an otherwise healthy system, a cyclical problem that over time heals on its own. Most of them still, to this day, hold the same view and the world’s economy and financial system is paying the costs of doing so. The eurodollar economy is falling apart and no amount of orthodoxy can reverse it because the eurodollar economy is orthodoxy.

"Central bank distortions have forced investors into positions they would not have held otherwise, and forced them to be the ‘same way round’ to a much greater extent than previously... unless fundamentals move so as to justify current valuations, when central banks move towards the exit, investors will too.... The way out may not prove so easy; indeed, we are not sure there is any way out at all."

A little over two years ago, in the middle of April 2013, there was a gold crash that came seemingly out of nowhere. Worse, for gold investors anyway, that crash was repeated just a few months later. Where gold had stood just shy of $1,800 an ounce at the start of QE3, those cascades had brought the metal price down to just $1,200. For many, especially orthodox economists, it heralded the end of the “fear trade” and meant, unambiguously, that the recovery had finally at long last arrived. However, gold price activity since QE3 has been a warning, and a big one, not cause for victory celebrations.