Carry Trade

The unwinding of the US dollar carry trade will be particularly severely felt where leverage is highest!

Is China (or the US) the next Greece?

The Fed may raise rates from 0.25% to 0.3% or possible even 0.5% sometime in the next 24 months… but these moves will be largely symbolic. Here's why...

Why Greece is simply a symptom of a much larger problem

THIS IS THE REAL CRISIS THAT GREECE WILL TRIGGER SHORTLY .

A 3rd Greek bailout "Fix", an unchanged ECB with Draghi preparing to reiterate "whatever it takes" - apart from for Greece, and The Fed appearing more hawkishly tilted to a September liftoff (no matter what happens in Greece).... The result - EURUSD is collapsing...

For once the Chinese stock market rollercoaster (where the Shanghai Composite closed up 2.4% after another day of early selling) was fully upstaged by events in Europe.

Among all the mindless blather served up by the talking heads of bubblevision is the recurrent claim that “its all priced-in”. That is, there is no danger of a serious market correction because anything which might imply trouble ahead—-such as weak domestic growth, stalling world trade or Grexit——is already embodied in stock market prices. Yep, those soaring averages are already fully risk-adjusted! Nothing to see here, it will be argued. Today’s plunge is just another opportunity for those who get it to “buy-the-dip”. And they might well be right in the very short-run. But this time the outbreak of volatility is different. This time the dip buyers will be carried out on their shields.

The Greece impasse set to culminate on Sunday continues to have a massive impact on at least one stock market, unfortunately it is the wrong one, located on a continent which is mostly irrelevant to the future of the Greek people (unless that whole AIIB bailout does take place of course). We are, of course, talking about China which as noted earlier, started off horribly, plunging over 7% with over 1000 stocks hitting 10% limit down, then in the afternoon session mysteriously recovering all losses and even trading slightly higher on the day, before the late selling returned once more, and the Shanghai Composite plunged to close down 5.8%: an unimaginable 20% total roundtrip move!

Before taking a look at Europe, an update on China. Just a few short hours ago, when looking at the bursting of the Chinese bubble where stocks were down between 3% and 5% across the board in the first post-holiday trading session after the worst week in 7 years, we said that "without assistance (levitation) from the same PBOC that just clamped down on liquidity, the China bubble has burst." And then as if by request, minutes later we got, drumroll, levitation and the stickiest stick-save by the PBOC seen in months, when the Shanghai Composite staged an unprecedented 7% surge from the lows to close 2.2% higher after tumbling as much as 5% earlier in the session. And just like that, faith in the "wealth effect" is preserved.

We believe that the above chart is telling us that this Super Cycle of leveraging is ending. What's coming next won't be pretty.

"We have a problem with this, and that is central bank hubris. They now think that they are omnipotent, because, essentially the government has said we are going to pass over all control of the economy to the central banks, they say to everybody else including financial market participants that “you don’t know, you don’t understand, we have our models and they are right”. And that kind of hubristic approach is when you sow the seeds of your own destruction."

After 27 years, honest price discovery has been destroyed, thereby reducing the nerve centers of capitalism - the money and capital markets - to little more than gambling casinos. Accordingly, speculative rent-seeking in the financial arena has replaced enterprenurial innovation and supply side investment and productivity as the modus operandi of the US economy. This has resulted in a severe diminution of main street growth and a massive redistribution of windfall wealth to the tiny share of households which own most of the financial assets. Warren Buffett’s $73 billion net worth is the poster boy for this untoward state of affairs. The massive and systematic falsification of asset prices which lies at the heart of this deformation of capitalism is a direct and unavoidable consequence of monetary central planning.

Following API's considerably larger than expeted inventory draw last night, DOE reported a huge 6.81 million barrel draw (against expectations of a 3.46mm barrel draw). This is the biggest inventory draw in 11 months. In addition production rose once again (up 0.25%) to new record highs at 9.61mm bbl/day. Crude prices are holding gains after this.

The world’s financial system is saturated with speculations fostered by nearly two-decades of central bank credit inflation. Just since 2006, the footings of central bank balance sheets have expanded from $6 trillion to upwards of $22 trillion. That’s all combustible monetary fuel that cannot be recalled; it can only be liquidated in the course of a monumental meltdown in the casino. So, yes, after the carnage of the past few days the global sovereign bond index has lost $625 billion since the bond bubble peak in late March. Call that spring training.