Borrowing Costs

The answer, of course, is yes: they are after all, economists (who somehow, with no real world experience, determine the daily fate of billions of productive and capital-allocation decisions every day). But it is one thing for everyone to discuss the obvious anecdotally by the water cooler. It is something else for this verbal heresy to be printed in a "serious" publication. Such as Reuters, which today asks if "the Federal Reserve has watched the U.S. recession and painfully slow recovery through rose-colored glasses?" And answers: "A look at the U.S. central bank's economic forecasts over the past five years suggest it has." It then explains: "Since October 2007, when the Fed's policy committee began giving quarterly predictions for GDP growth and the jobless rate, the central bank has downgraded its nearer-term forecasts almost two-and-a-half times as often as it upgraded them. The gap between Wall Street's expectations for 2012 growth and the Fed's own current view points to yet another downgrade on Thursday, when policymakers wrap up a two-day meeting that has world financial markets rapt." It concludes: "The trend of back-pedaling shows how poorly the central bank has fared at reading the economic tea leaves, with the Fed's optimism a likely factor in policy decisions through the Great Recession and its fallout, economists say." In summary: the world's most ebullient and permabullish forecasters, who incidentally happen to constantly be wrong in their desperate attempts to affect the only thing that matters: consumer and investor sentiment and confidence via the increasingly irrelevant myth that are asset prices, happen to run the monetary world and "determine" just what the future looks like. Needless to say, if the Fed's presidents were actually employed in the private sector, they would have been fired ages ago. Only in a fiat world do they not only keep their jobs, but keep on running the world.

Europe's chicken or egg problem is about to strike with a vengeance. As a reminder, the biggest paradox of the recently conceived "make it up as you go along" bailout of Europe is that "in order to be saved, Spain (and Italy) must first be destroyed". Sure enough, the markets have long since priced in the "saved" part with the Spanish 10 year sliding to multi-month lows, but in the process everyone forgot about the destruction. Because as has been made quite clear, secondary market bond buying will not be activated without a formal bailout request by a country, in essence admitting its insolvency, and handing over domestic fiscal and sovereign control to the IMF and other international entities. As a further reminder, many, Goldman Sachs especially, had hoped that Spain would request a bailout as soon as Friday. To wit: "With a large (and uncovered) redemption looming at the end of October (and under pressure from other Euro area governments), we expect Spain to move towards seeking support." Alas, as we expected, this is now not going to happen, and the pricing in of the entire "saved" part will have to be unwound as Spain is forced to accept being "destroyed" first. To wit: "I don't know if Spain needs to ask for it," Rajoy told parliament in a debate session, referring to an international rescue for Spain."

SocGen’s Sebastian Galy:

The market decided rose tinted glasses were not enough, put on its dark shades and hit the nightlife.

And the uber-bullishness is based on what? Hopium. Hope that the Fed will unleash QE3, or nominal GDP level targeting and buy, buy, buy — because what the market really needs right now is more bond flippers, right? Hope that Europeans have finally gotten their act together in respect to buying up periphery debt to create a ceiling on borrowing costs. Hope that this time is different in China, and that throwing a huge splash of stimulus cash at infrastructure will soften the landing.

There is only one event on pundits and traders minds today: the ECB's press conference, during which Draghi will announce nothing material, as the substance of the bank's message has been leaked, telegraphed and distributed extensively over the past three weeks before just to gauge and test the market's response as every part of this latest "plan", which is nothing but SMP-meets-Operation "Tsiwt" was being made up on the fly. And not even a weaker than expected Spanish short-term auction in which €3.5 billion in 2014-2016 bonds were sold at plunging Bids to Cover, sending yields paradoxically spiking just ahead of what the ECB should otherwise announce will be the buying sweet spot, can dent the market's hope that Draghi will pull some final detail out of his hat. Or any detail for that matter, because while the leaks have been rich in broad strokes, there has been no information on the Spanish bailout conditions, on how one can use "unlimited" and "sterilized" in the same sentence, and how the ECB can strip its seniority with impairing its current holdings of tens of billions in Greek bonds without suddenly finding itself with negative capital. Elsewhere, the Swedish central bank cut rates by 25 bps unexpectedly: after all nobody wants to be last in the global currency devaluation race. Ironically, just before this happened, the BOJ's Shirakawa said that he won't buy bonds to finance sovereign debt: but why? Everyone is doing it. Finally, in news that really matters, and not in the "how to extend a ponzi by simply diluting the purchasing power of money" category, Greek unemployment soared to 24.4% on expectations of a rise to "just" 23.5%. This means there was an increase of 1.3% in Greek unemployment in one month.

Yesterday's "leak" of Draghi's comments that it is not monetization if just the tip only bonds with a maturity of 3 years or less are monetized, aka, legitimate monetization does not cause inflation was so horribly handled that the ECB huffed and puffed in a desperate attempt to appear angry, even though it was absolutely delighted that it had even more ammo in its war against Germany. Today, the leakage continues only this time nobody cares that Draghi's desperation is hitting the headlines left and right. As a result, Draghi literally pulled a carbon copy of Hank Paulson, and while he did not have a three page term sheet in hand, threatened that the Euro would end unless he was allowed to monetize short-term bonds. Here's looking at your Germany. From Bloomberg: "European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said the bank’s primary mandate compels it to intervene in bond markets to wrest back control of interest rates and ensure the euro’s survival. Mounting his strongest case yet for ECB bond purchases, Draghi told lawmakers in a closed-door session at the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday that the bank has lost control of borrowing costs in the 17-nation monetary union."

Tomorrow the Battle of Frankfurt begins. Make no mistake in your thinking as America ends its holiday weekend; it will be a battle and there will be bodies littering the field of engagement. Spain and the rest have aims, plans, schemes if not hopes and ambitions in direct opposition to Germany and her side. The outcomes prayed for are a demand for money and a resistance to those demands.  The pleas of Spain are about to be answered; first from the ECB and then from Germany’s acceptance or rejection of the Draghi plan. The “Game of Muddle” will be ended and real answers to real insistences will be given. It all comes down to this; money and how much of it and under what circumstances and whether the nations with capital are willing to hand it to their neighbors and watch their credit ratings, their own cost of funding, their standards of living decline to a mean for all of Europe.

With the US closed today, the rest of the world is enjoying a moderate rise in risk for the same old irrational reason we have all grown to loathe in the New Normal: expectations of more easing, or "bad news if great news", this time from China, which over the weekend reported the first official sub-50 PMI print declining from the magical 50.1 to 49.2, as now even the official RAND() Chinese data has joined the HSBC PMI indicator in the contraction space for the first time since November. Sadly, following today's manufacturing PMI update, we find that the rest of the world is not doing any better, and in fact of the 22 countries we track, 80% are now in contraction territory. True, Europe did experience a modest bounce from multi-month lows of 44 in July to 45.1 in August (below expectations of 45.3), but this is merely a dead cat bounce, not the first, and certainly not the last, just like the US housing, and now that China is officially in the red, expect the next shoe to drop in Europe. Also expect global GDP to eventually succumb to the manufacturing challenges faced by virtually every country in the world, and to post a negative print in the coming months.

We don't need recession

Or means of repression

Just give us some money

Our life could be sunny too...

A new and important bullish indicator for the gold market is that gold calls are at highs not seen since the October 2008 low as option traders go long gold in the belief that it will go higher. It suggests that option traders believe that U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will hint at or announce additional money printing and monetary easing at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming, symposium. Alternatively, it suggests that they are bullish on gold due to the risks posed to the dollar and the risk of inflation taking off. The ratio of outstanding calls to buy the SPDR Gold Trust versus puts to sell jumped to 2.69 to 1 on August 24th and reached 2.76 earlier this month, the highest level since October 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Ownership of calls is up 26% since the July 20th options expiry. Ten of the most owned actively owned ETF option contracts are bullish. Option traders are regarded as savvier and tend to be more sophisticated then the more speculative futures traders.

The Spanish bank run has started -  as was explicitly warned about 6 months ago!

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• Europe finally starting to smell the coffee: ECB Urging Weaker Basel Liquidity Rule on Crisis Concerns (Bloomberg)
• Japan Cuts Economic Assessment (Reuters)
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Yesterday, Spain was kind enough to advise those who track its economy, that things in 2010 and 2011 were in fact worse than had been reported, following an adjustment to both 2010 and 2011 GDP "historical" data. Today, we learn that Q2 data (also pending further downward adjustments), contracted by 0.4% sequentially in Q2, in line with expectations, but somehow, and we have to figure out the math on this, the drop on a Year over Year basis was far worse than expected, printing at -1.3% on expectations of just a -1.0% decline. However, while its economic collapse is well known by all, the surprise came in the deposits department which imploded by a whopping 5% in July, plunging to 1.509 trillion euros at end-July from 1.583 trillion in the previous month. Keep in mind this is after the June 29 European summit which supposedly fixed everything. Turns out it didn't, and the people are no longer stupid enough to believe anything Europe's pathological liar politicians spew.The good news: Greek deposits saw a dead cat bounce after collapsing by ridiculous amounts in the past several years: at this point anyone who puts their money in Greek banks must surely realize that the probability of getting even one cent back is equal odds with going to Vegas and at least having a good time while watching one's money burn.

While there are many answers to this rhetorical question, a key one is the schism that exists between the two media behemoths when it comes to the topic of the NEW QE, elsewhere incorrectly called QE3. While the now virtually daily missives from Fed mouthpiece Jon Hilsenrath, whom once has to wonder whether he is more of a part time worker at the WSJ or the New York Fed, are there to force markets ever higher each day, with promises that Bernanke will not sit idly by if the S&P were to ever close red (the S&P being a multi-year highs notwithstanding), and that as he stick saved the European close on Friday, the Fed has lots of additional capacity for more QE, Bloomberg actually has the temerity to ask: why do we need any more QE: after all so far all previous iterations have been a disaster. Sure enough, a few hours after Hilsenrath did his latest Fed planted piece in which he amusingly pretended to be objective about more QE and "sized up" costs of more QE, here comes Bloomberg in its daily Brief newsletter, with a far simpler question: why the hell do we keep doing the same idiocy over and over, hoping and praying to generate inflation, knowing full well if we do get inflation, with global central banks soon to hold half of the world's GDP on their books, it will promptly deteriorate to the "hyper" kind.

While every business and industry implicitly believes in its meaningless acronyms and language, nothing compares to the financial services sector. This industry, the one who gifted us APR, ISM, RSP as well as Core CPI calculated to the 3rd decimal point, is the unchallenged king of senseless terms only a risk manager would love. In response to these unnecessary complications, IceCap is introducing a necessary yet simplified tool for measuring the state of the World’s leading economies – "The Flounder Meter." This new metric considers the combination of money printing, bank bailouts, debt levels, government spending and borrowing costs for a given country. The Flounder Meter will finally allow everyone to see through the smoke and mirrors and decide for themselves whether a country is in good financial health.