Institutional Investors

A look at the price action in the foreign exchange market and the technical forces in the week ahead.  

The pricing of 'safe' assets reflects the ongoing uncertainty in a world that is in the grip of the lunacy of policymakers who have seemingly lost all sense of perspective and are engaged in a huge gamble. This essential fundamental backdrop has not changed for the better lately, but for the worse. What this once again demonstrates is that intervention by central banks is creating incentives for many institutional investors to take inordinate risks in the name of preserving the purchasing power of the savings that have been entrusted to them. The problem is that the gains of today are absolutely certain to become the losses of tomorrow for investors taking the bait, as the echo bubble created by loose monetary policy is fated to turn into a major bust once the boom has played out. When the tide is going out, a great many naked swimmers will be revealed.

• U.S. Bulks Up to Combat Iran (WSJ)
• Taking sides in Syria is hard choice for Israel (Reuters)
• Gold Traders Most Bearish in Three Years After Drop (BBG)
• It's a Hard Job Predicting Payrolls Number  (WSJ)
• EU economies to breach deficit limits as economic picture darkens (FT)
• IBM Says U.S. Justice Investigating Bribery Allegations (BBG)
• At Texas fertilizer plant, a history of theft, tampering (Reuters)
• SAC Sets Plan to Dock Pay in Cases of Wrongdoing (WSJ) - "in case of"?
• EU to propose duties on Chinese solar panels (Reuters)
• Billionaire Kaiser Exploiting Charity Loophole With Boats (BBG)
• SEC Zeroing In on 'Prime' Funds (WSJ)
• Apple Avoids $9.2 Billion in Taxes With Debt Deal (BBG)
• China April official services PMI at 54.5 vs 55.6 in March (Reuters)

Capitalism may have bested communism a few decades ago, but exactly how our economic system allocates society’s scarce resources is now undergoing its first serious transformation since the NYSE’s founding fathers met under the buttonwood tree in 1792.  Technology, complexity and speed have already transformed how stocks trade; but As ConvergEx's Nick Colas notes, the real question now is what role these forces will play in long-term capital formation and allocation.  Rookie mistakes like the Twitter hack flash crash might be easy to deride, but make no mistake, Colas reminds us: the changes that started with high frequency and algorithmic trading are just the first step to an entirely different process of determining stock prices.  The only serious challenge this metamorphosis will likely face is a notable crash of the still-developing system and resultant regulation back to more strictly human-based processes.

And just like that, European banks are back in capital raising mode, starting with what is perceived by some as Europe's strongest bank (alternatively, the most undercapitalized): Deutsche Bank, which at least check had a Core Tier 1 cap ratio somewhere south of 2%.

• DEUTSCHE BANK TO SELL UP TO 90 MLN NEW SHARES TO RAISE EU2.8B
• DEUTSCHE BANK SAYS NO PUBLIC OFFERING PLANNED 
  
• DEUTSCHE BANK SHRS WILL BE PLACED VIA ACCELERATED BOOKBUILD

Since this is about 10% of the company's total float, the stock is not happy.  The question why DB announced this just ahead of its earnings release should certainly make one ask just how well capitalized Europe (where every bank purports to having a fortress Basel III balance sheet) truly is?

Macro perspective of this week's events.  Hint:  the ECB meeting may be the most interesting.  

Overview of the price action in foreign exchange and outlook for the week ahead.  

“Recovery” has become the shibboleth constantly invoked by people running things after the crisis of 2008. Unfortunately, no such recovery was underway. It was papered over by the twin Federal Reserve policies of quantitative easing and financial repression – a combination of the nation’s central bank loaning vast new amounts of money into existence at ultra-low interest rates (hardly any interest to pay back) and creating steady monetary inflation to reduce the burden of existing debt by shrinking the dollar value of the debt. The program was a racket in the sense that it was fundamentally dishonest. The presumed purpose of these shenanigans from the point of view of the Federal Reserve and the White House was to keep the financial system stable and afloat, and therefore to keep “normal” American daily life going. Unfortunately, it was based on the unreal assumption that the financial norms of, say, 2006 could be ginned back up again, and this premise was just inconsistent with the reality of a post-Peak-Cheap-Oil world. Unfortunately, there was no organized counter-view to this wishful thinking anywhere within the boundaries of the political establishment.

There have been several recent developments that have flown in the face of both neo-liberalism and ordo-liberalism and thrown investors off balance.  Discuss.  

Two days in Washington D.C. kept caterers busy but produced a 2,126 word communique long on slogans and short on anything actionable. The G-20 statement (below) can be boiled down simply, as we tweeted,

G-20 statement: "if we all lie, same as nobody lying"

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 19, 2013

And just to add one more embarrassing detail for them, while section 4 discusses "Japan's recent policy actions," not only does Canada's finance minister James Flaherty believe they "didn't discuss the Japanese Yen," but Japan's Kuroda believes, comments on 'misalignments', "were not meant for the BoJ."

It's time to go in for the kill. Buy as much physical Gold as you can.

A Roundup of Opinions

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A discussion of what investors who are being displaced by BOJ purchases are going to do. It may not be as simple as rushing to buy foreign assets that people are anticipating.

Thanks to the Fed's ZIRP, the investing world is on a constant reach for yield; and due to the fact that the last bubble of investor largesse (ignoring leverage and reality) was not 'punished' but in fact 'bailed-out', participants in the financial markets learned nothing. Just as the last crisis was formed on the back of an insatiable mortgage-backed security market desperate for new loans (any loans) of increasingly dubious quality to securitize, so this time it is subprime auto loans that have taken over. As a Reuters review of court records shows, subprime auto lenders are showing up in a lot of personal bankruptcy filings. At car dealers across the United States, loans to subprime borrowers are surging - up 18% in 2012 YoY, to 6.6 million borrowers. Subprime auto lending is just one of several mini-bubbles the bond-buying program has created across a range of assets; "it's the same sort of thing we saw in 2007, people get driven to do riskier and riskier things." Of course, with auto production having been the backbone of so many macro data points that are used to 'show' the real economy recovering (despite the channel-stuffing), now that the growth in auto-sales are stalling, it is for the subprime originators "under extreme pressure to hit goals" in their boiler-room-like dealings to extend loans (at ever higher rates) and securitize while the Fed 'music' is still playing. It seems we truly never learn.

Synthetic securities based on putrid shipping loans