Consumer lending

One of the hallmarks of the ongoing European economic depression has been the complete implosion in the continent's automotive sales (here and here) and as Reuters summarized last week, there is little hope of a rebound for a long, long time. Curiously, where Europe has seen complete devastation, the US has been surprisingly resilient, and even when factoring in for such traditional gimmicks as channel stuffing, performed most notoriously by GM, which in March had the second highest amount of cars parked on dealer lots in its post-bankruptcy history, car sales have been rather brisk which in turn has allowed the US to report manufacturing numbers which, until the recent PMI and ISM data, were better than expected. One does, wonder, however, how much of a factor for this has been the forward demand-pull impact of Hurricane Sandy in late 2012, when as a result of tens of thousands of cars being totaled in tri-state area flooding, consumers scrambled to car lots to buy new autos. Well, we may have found the reason for the recent disappointing performance in both the Chicago PMI and the Manufacturing ISM - the positive effect from Sandy is finally fading, as today's domestic car sales show, which posted a surprising decline in March, especially in non-Trucks which dipped to the lowest since October 2013, and the first miss in total light vehicle sales SAAR since October.

Why has the Fed paid some $6 billion in interest to foreign banks, in the process subsidizing and keeping insolvent European and other foreign banks, in business and explicitly to the detriment of countless US-based banks who have to compete with Fed-funded foreign banks and who have to fire countless workers courtesy of this Fed subsidy to foreign workers? And, perhaps more importantly, why will the Fed pay about $5 billion or much more in interest to foreign banks each year starting in 2014? 

Back in 2007, at the peak of the credit and housing bubble, Wall Street knew very well the securitization (and every other) party was ending, which is why the internal names used for most of the Collateralized Debt Obligations - securitized products designed to provide a last dash trace of yield in a market in which all the upside had already been taken out - sold to less sophisticated, primarily European, investors were as follows: "Subprime Meltdown," "Hitman," "Nuclear Holocaust," "Mike Tyson's Punchout," and, naturally, "Shitbag." Yet even in the last days of the bubble, Wall Street had a certain integrity - it sold securitized products collateralized by houses, which as S&P, and certainly Moody's, will attest were expected to never drop in price again. But one thing that was hardly ever sold even in the peak days of the 2007 credit bubble were securitizations based on personal-loans, the reason being even back then everyone's memory was still fresh with the recollection that it was precisely personal-loan securitization that was at the core of the previous, and in some ways worse, credit bubble - that of the late 1990s, which resulted with the bankruptcy of Conseco Finance. Well, in a few short days, those stalwarts of suicidal financial innovation Fortress and AIG, are about to unleash on the market (or at least those who invest other people's money in the absolutely worst possible trash to preserve their Wall Street careers while chasing a few basis points of yield) the second coming of the very worst of the last two credit bubbles.

We have long been pounding the table on what in our view is the biggest detriment to any future growth for not only corporate America, but the entire US (where, sadly, government investment IRRs just happen to be negative - a fact that most won't understand until it is too late, especially not self-anointed economic wisemen whose only solution to everything is "do more of the same" yet who thought the utility of the Internet would be eclipsed by that of the fax machine): the complete lack of capital expenditures at the corporate level, and lack of (re)investment spending. It turns out that, however, that there is more to the story, and as the following chart from SocGen's Albert Edwards shows, not only are companies using up what actual free cash flows they have for such stupid stock boosting gimmicks such as harebrained M&A (just look at the recent fiasco between HP and Autonomy to see how rushed M&A always ends), and of course buybacks, but they are now levering to the hilt to do even more of this. The last time they did this? The golden days of the credit bubble.

So now that Vikram Pandit has exited stage right from the CEO position at Citigroup, a number of people have asked me about the Zombie Dance Queen.  

• German central bank warns country’s financial health not a given (WaPo)
• Secret Libor Committee Clings to Anonymity After Rigging Scandal (Bloomberg)
• Peru Declares State of Emergency to Quell Violent Mining Protests (Dow Jones)
• Euro-Area Economic Adjustment Only Half Complete, Moody’s Says (Bloomberg)
• Wall Street Leaderless in Rules Fight as Dimon Diminished (Bloomberg)
• China Swaps Drop From Three-Month High as PBOC Adds Record Cash (Bloomberg)
• China invest $1 billion in U.S. Cheniere's LNG plant, Blackstone to act as intermediary buffer (FT, Reuters)
• Romney Offers Lukewarm Support for Fed Audit - Hilsenrath (WSJ)
• U.K. Unexpectedly Posts Deficit as Corporation Taxes Plunge (Bloomberg)
• Obama issues military threat to Syria (FT)
• Merkel Allies Signal Concessions on Greece Before Samaras Visit (Bloomberg)
• Chinese banks warned of foreign exchange risks (China Daily)

We are just about 16 hours away from Jamie Dimon's sworn testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, which even has the theatrical name: "A Breakdown in Risk Management: What Went Wrong at JPMorgan Chase?" Will anyone learn anything? Of course not: Jamie Dimon has been well-schooled in not disclosing critical trading information, and will certainly use the "proprietary position" and "more shareholder losses" excuse for any directed question asking how big the JPM CIO loss has become. Because while the hearing could have been productive, if indeed its purpose was to seek to prevent future massive losses of scale such as the suffered by the JPM prop trading unit and its hundreds of billions in CDS notional position, the last thing anyone will care about tomorrow is market efficiency and actual regulation. First and foremost: grandstanding and posturing, in the case of the politicians, and not disclosing anything, without saying too many "I don't recall"s in the case of Dimon. Which is why we have little hope to get anything out of tomorrow's formulaic 2 hours of largely meaningless droning. That said, considering we have already covered the topic of the JPM loss from a mechanistic standpoint more than any other media outlet, there is one more chart we would like to share with readers.

The Fed Chairman, who is too busy to tweet at the moment, has just released his pre-recorded speech on Community Banking. In its we find the following pearl: "Despite some recent signs of improvement, the recovery has been frustratingly slow, constraining opportunities for profitable lending." Wait, hold on, yesterday the same Chairman told an eager headline scanning robotic world that economic growth was upgraded from "modest" to "moderate" - so which is it? Or will the Fed merely feed the HFT robots whatever cherry picked keywords are needed to nudge the market in the appropriate direction as required? Oh wait, we forgot... Election year. Carry on.

All you need to read.

Yes, banks are indeed on the hook should Greece file. Keep an eye on those Deutsche Bank puts. From S&P: "We consider that French banking group Crédit Agricole (GCA) has a significant sensitivity to Greece's creditworthiness and economic prospects, primarily through subsidiary Emporiki's funding needs and exposure to local credit risk. The downgrades reflect our view that reduced creditworthiness of the Greek sovereign puts pressure on GCA's financial profile, given its exposure to the troubled Greek economy, mostly through its subsidiary Emporiki Bank of Greece (not rated). The downgrade reflects our view that persistent deterioration of the Greek economy induces negative prospects for the local banking sector, which could translate into further material credit losses at Emporiki and/or a sharp decrease in its customer deposits. "

Summary of results:

• Citi Q1 revenue USD 19.7bln vs. Exp. USD 20.54bln; this is a whopping $5.7 billion drop from the $25.4 billion in Q1 2010. So much for revenue growth.
• Q1 EPS USD 0.10 vs. Exp. USD 0.09
• Q1 tier 1 capital ratio 13.3%
• Q1 tier 1 common equity ratio 11.3%
• Q1 net credit losses declined 25%
• Q1 Loan Loss Allowance drops to $36.6 billion from $48.7 billion year over year.
• Total deposits $865.9 billion compared $827.9 billion a year prior
  
• And the kicker: Q1 reserve release was $(3.37) billion on $4.2 billion profit from continuing operations. In other words, absent accounting gimmickry the company would barely have been profitable
  

Matt Taibbi has resurfaced with another stunner of Wall Street impropriety which will lead to merely more silence, even more unanswered questions and be quickly buried by the kleptocratic oligarchy: "It's hard to imagine a pair of people you would less want to hand a giant welfare check to — yet that's exactly what the Fed did. Just two months before the Macks bought their fancy carriage house in Manhattan, Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan's penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment."

After it was already confirmed that December was a subpar month for US retailers (whether snow can be blamed or not is irrelevant), and less money than expected was spent (it's ok, we no longer need the US consumer to lead the economy - the Fed is buying all the debt, it can also buy everything else), we finally get our first glimpse as to how even the week consumer performance in December was funded. Two words: "Charge it." Total US Consumer Debt in December rose by $6.09 billion December, on expectations of a $2.4 billion increase (and $4 billion higher than November's revised $2.022 billion). Yet what is most notable is that while Non-revolving loans increased by $3.8 billion (the lowest in the past 4 months), revolving loans posted their first increase since August 2008, increasing by $2.3 billion. Is the US consumer so tapped out that it is time to go to the credit card once again? And if so, does this mean that the drop off in excess reserves by over $180 billion compared to where they should be has been due to consumer lending. If that is the case, we may be far closer to Bernanke losing control of the trillions in excess reserves (and a surge in "velocity" or however one calls this archaic construct) than we had expected previously.

The fallout from Ambac's bankruptcy is not necessarily what many may think. The robo-signing plaintiffs and associated lawsuits will now get to see what happens when the spurned money of the big boys joins the fray!

Crude closes above $80 yesterday for the first time since May. However, a look at some fundamental and macroeconomic signals showed crude oil could be under increasing pressure, thus range-bound, through the rest of this year.