Capital Markets

Munch's "The Scream" may be all the rage today, but to Jim Grant, in his latest interview on Bloomberg TV, the record price paid for the painting is not so much a manifestation of modern art as one of modern currency: "This is the flight into things from paper" . Thus begins the latest polemic by the Grant's Interest Rate Observer author whose topic is as so often happens, the Federal Reserve (for his latest definitive expostulatin on why the Fed should be disbanded and why a gold standard should return, delivered from the heart of Liberty 33 itself, read here). The world in which we invest is a world of immense wall to wall manipulations by our friends in Washington. And people get off on Goldman Sachs because it has done this and this, it is pulling wires... The Federal Reserve is the giant squid of squids, it is the vampire squid of vampire squids."

There are two forthcoming dates which will set the direction and strength of the tide and certainly have a marked affect upon the ventures. They are this Sunday, May 6, when both the French and Greek populace will decide on who is running their government and then on May 31 when the Irish have their refrendum. At the least one must be thankful that there are Democracies that are working and that no group of Generals or some thug is making the decisions. Forthcoming we visualize many Socialist demands such as Eurobonds being made and Germany standing alone in the corner and refusing to fund which will make for all kinds of volatile markets. The bigger crisis though, we fear, will be when Germany says no to funding some grand Socialist idea. The problem is the size of the economy. The German economy is 25% of the American economy and it is going to get down to a matter of capital and what Germany can afford without being downgraded and a European Union without a AAA rated Germany is a very different affair both for the EU’s debt structure and for the Euro. In June the Fed’s Operation Twist comes to an end. There is no new stimulus plan on the table in either America or in Europe now. This means that the last four years of monetary easing and living off of that which has been printed is coming to an end. The consequences of this, historically, have been declines in the equity markets.

Traders were watching Spain cautiously this morning which at around 4 am Eastern sold €2.52 billion of three- and five-year government bonds, in its first bond auction since Standard & Poor's cut its sovereign rating by two notches last week. The results were mixed because while more than the maximum range of €2.5 billion was sold (on solid total demand of €8.07 billion) or €2.52 billion, Spain paid up for the privilege, with yields rising across the board, reaching just why of 5% for the 2017 bonds and more importantly pricing with tails to secondary market prices, confirming that the trend in rising yields at primary issuance is very much unsustainable. This in turn caused the EURUSD to get spooked and slide to overnight lows, a move not mimicked by broader equity futures which this morning are again in a world of their own, and now simply await to see if the Initial Claims number later will be far worse than expected in order to soar.

Every quarter as part of its refunding announcement, the Office of Debt Management together with the all important Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, which as noted previously is basically Wall Street's conduit telling the Treasury what to do, releases its Fiscal Quarterly Report which is for all intents and purposes the most important presentation of any 3 month period, containing not only 70 slides worth of critical charts about the fiscal status of the country, America's debt issuance, its funding needs, the structure of the Treasury portfolio, but more importantly what future debt supply and demand needs look like, as well as various sundry topics which will shape the debate between Wall Street and Treasury execs for the next 3 months: some of the fascinating topics touched upon are fixed income ETFs, algo trading in Treasurys, and finally the implications of High Frequency trading - a topic which has finally made it to the highest levels of executive discussion. It is presented in its entirety below (in a non-click bait fashion as we respect readers' intelligence), although we find the following statement absolutely priceless: "Anticipation of central bank behavior has become a significant driver of market sentiment." This is coming from the banks and Treasury. Q.E.D.

Gold’s London AM fix this morning was USD 1,661.25, EUR 1,253.02, and GBP 1,024.70 per ounce. Yesterday's AM fix was USD 1,662.50, EUR 1,256.61 and GBP 1,021.44 per ounce.

Silver is trading at $30.85/oz, €23.37/oz and £19.10/oz. Platinum is trading at $1,570.00/oz, palladium at $677.60/oz and rhodium at $1,350/oz.

Something funny happened when last August CNBC hired access journalist extraordinaire Andrew Sorkin to spiff up its 6-9 am block also known as Squawk Box: nothing. At least, nothing from a secular viewership basis, because while the block saw a brief pick up in viewership driven by the concurrent (first of many) US debt ceiling crisis and rating downgrade, it has been a downhill slide ever since. In fact, as the chart below shows, the Nielsen rating for the show's core 25-54 demo just slid to multi-year lows. And as NY Daily News, the seemingly ceaseless slide has forced CNBC to start panicking: "CNBC insiders tell us executives at the cable business channel are “freaking out” because viewership levels are down essentially across-the-board, particularly with its marquee shows, “Squawk Box” and “Closing Bell." “Their biggest attractions have become their biggest losers,” says one TV industry insider familiar with the cable channel’s numbers. According to Nielsen ratings obtained by Gatecrasher, from April 2011 to April 2012, “Squawk Box” is down 16 percent in total viewers and 29 percent in the important 25-54 demographic bracket that advertisers buy." Yet is it really fair to blame the slide of the morning block's show on just one man?

In yet another 2011 déjà vu moment, Europe’s bank funding window is slamming shut again (the catalyst that brought the 2011 Euro crisis vintage to its heights). Nowhere is this more evident than when comparing monthly debt issuance in the first 4 months of 2012 to the previous two years. Sadly, even despite taking place while the LTRO effect was front and center, Europe still was unable to match prior year debt.  Fine, the skeptics will say, this simply means that there is less debt maturing and thus less need for new issuance… And the skeptics would be wrong. As charts two and three demonstrate, this is broadly correct for only 4 countries, of which 3 still have their own currencies (coincidence). The balance is a sorry sight, with Germany, Spain and Italy seeing nearly EUR100 billion in net unrolled redemptions just Year to Date alone! As UBS very poignantly points out, “It is difficult to see this as anything other than contagion from the latest variant of the euro crisis.”

All you need to read.

If last week was Europe's days of hope, even as the continent was again breaking, predicated by the utterly ridiculous such as a successful Bill auction, a weak Spanish Bond issue, somehow spun by the propaganda crew as good despite pricing at an utterly unsustainable interest rate, and various German confidence indicators which soared to multi-year highs, today is the bitter hangover. Where to start...

Here is a recap of today's European bond issuance as well as the Wall Street "instaview" response to each

Decades of manipulation by the Federal Reserve (through its creation of paper money) and by Congress (through its taxing and spending) have pushed the US economy into a circumstance that can't be sustained but from which there is no graceful exit. With few exceptions, all of the noble souls who chose a career in "public service" and who've advanced to be voting members of Congress are committed to chronic deficits, though they deny it. For political purposes, deficits work. The people whose wishes come true through the spending side of the deficit are happy and vote to reelect. The people on the borrowing side of the deficit aren't complaining, since they willingly buy the Treasury bonds and Treasury bills that fund the deficit. And taxpayers generally tolerate deficits as a lesser evil than a tax hike. So stay up as late as you like on election night to see who wins, but the deficits aren't going to stop anytime soon. The debt mountain will keep growing. The part of it the government acknowledges is now approaching $16 trillion, which is more than the country's gross domestic product for a year. Obviously, the debt can't keep growing faster than the economy forever, but the people in charge do seem determined to find out just how far they can push things.

The time has come to raise the 'noise' level for global markets to Defcon 3 as Clive Hale, of View from the Bridge, discusses his four largest stressors currently. Instead of going 'hmmm' as Grant Williams regularly does, Hale is screaming 'aaargh' as he sees Japanese radioactivity uncertainty, market manipulation, the main-stream media's anaesthetising propaganda, and finally the euro (that last lingering but fatally flawed bastion of european union) plethora problems all increasingly weighing on global macro concerns.

It would appear that the recent renewed excitement down in the Falklands was indeed the writing on the wall for a nation that is now desperate enough to nationalize foreign entities. Argentina, still unable to access capital markets years after its restructuring appears to be hitting an irrational wall again as its CDS has exploded wider recently, and even more so today with the YPF news, to near 1000bps - its widest in 4 months. Simply put this is not rational in any game-theoretic strategy and is frighteningly indicative of a supreme (irrecoverable) defection from friends-with-benefits status of the world - indicative only of massive internal problems in the South American nation. But do not worry, as Lagarde and her friends will just bring a bigger bag around to the next G-20 meeting as we are sure the IMF's members will have enough money to deal with Argentina AND Europe.

At the start of April, ECB's Draghi noted, "let's keep in mind that it [the LTRO] is not capital", adding that "if a bank does not have capital, it would be better to raise it now". Given the rapidly fading glow of LTRO's liquidity flush, the seemingly 'wasted' ammunition that Spanish and Italian banks have fired at the sovereign bond bears and the complete and utter lack of capital raising that has occurred, perhaps it is no wonder that credit spreads on the major European financials have exploded back to near their wides once again (LTRO-encumbrance aside). As Barclays notes today, the major financials alone look set to need over EUR120 billion in capital to bring their credit risks down to acceptable levels to be able to openly access capital markets once again. This means a median 30% of current equity market capitalization has to be raised. Just as we pointed out again and again, not only is the LTRO an encumbrance of bank balance sheets (and therefore increasingly subordinates all existing bond-holders implicitly reducing recoveries in a worst case scenario) but it delayed much-needed decision-making by giving the banks an 'out' for a few months.

Each day then that passes, as the cash river runs dry, will change the dynamics of the investment world. The biggest change that I see forthcoming on the landscape, beyond those which I have noted, I believe will take place in Germany. China is heading towards some sort of landing and most of Europe is now officially in a recession. The bite of the austerity measures will deepen the process and between the two I think we will begin to see a decline in the finances of Germany which will bring all manner of howls and screams. Germany cannot keep heading in one direction while the rest of its partners founder all around them. The demands of Berlin are self-defeating eventually as demand falls off and I think we are just at the cusp of deterioration in Germany. The problem, all along, has been that Eurobonds or other measures representing a transfer union will cause the averaging of all of the economies in Europe so that the periphery countries benefit with a higher standard of living while the wealthier nations have standards of living that decline as the result of accumulated debts for the troubled nations. This will bring out nationalism again in force as the grand dream succumbs to the grim reality of the costs for nations that have lived beyond their means. The Pied Piper always gets paid and Hamelin still rests upon German soil.