Investment Grade

The underlying question in Bill Gross' latest monthly letter, built around Jeremy Stein's (in)famous speech earlier this month, is the following: "How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?" He then proceeds to provide a very politically correct answer, which is to be expected for the manager of the world's largest bond fund. Our answer is simpler: We know there is an irrational exuberance asset bubble, because the Fed is still in existence. Far simpler.

This coming from the guy who a month ago called for "Dow 20,000", all we can say is... #Ref!

Read on as the MSM pick up on what I've been ranting about for 2 years. Virtually every penny of the big banks' profits consists of taxpayer bailout money. This doesn't include the ~60% of revenue paid out as bonuses, of course!

As we noted yesterday, the credit bubble is in full swing as high-yield covenant protections hit a new low in January. At the same time, new issue premia in high yield credit has remained extremely low (meaning demand is high) - even as leverage (measured in a number of ways) surges to post-financial-crisis highs. With low yields and technical demand so abundant, firms appear to be leveraging-up in favor of shareholders. But, as is always the case, there is a limit to just how much leverage can be piled on before credit spreads 'snap' and raise the cost of capital - hindering the equity price. Finally, for the 'cash on the balance sheet' advocates, US firms' Cash/Debt is its lowest (worst) since pre-crisis. Banks continue to delever, sovereigns relever, and non-financials taking their lead - this didn't end well last time... and this time, exuberance and positioning is very heavy.

Both the recent increase in interest rates and renewed questions about the duration of QE3, sparked by the release of the December FOMC minutes, have raised concerns about a 'Great Rotation' out of credit and into stocks. Barclays notes that the story goes something like this: negative total returns in fixed income and increasing equity prices will drive investors to sell the fixed income assets they have accumulated over the past several years and buy stocks. This “Great Rotation” will force investment grade corporate spreads wider. However, in nearly 100 years of data, Barclays finds no evidence of a period when rates rose, spreads widened, and equity returns were positive. Risky assets are generally correlated. The few times that higher rates were accompanied by wider spreads happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation was accelerating. In each of these periods, equity prices fell sharply. As we have been warning, credit spread deterioration has tended to front-run equity weakness (with some false positives) but never with the divergence remaining consistent as a 'rotation' would suggest.

If yesterday's indications of the near-record overweight net long positioning in Russell 2000 Futures & incredible net short VIX futures positioning, along with the extreme flows contrarian indication was not enough to concern investors that the 'money' is in, then the following four charts should cross the tipping point. Citi's Panic/Euphoria guage for US stocks has only been more euphoric on two occasions - Q4 2000 & 2008; Goldman's S&P 500 positioning has only been this extremely long-biased on two occasions - Q4 2008 & Q2 2011; and Barclays' credit-equity divergence has only been this over-bought stocks on two occasions - Q4 2008 & Q2 2012. It doesn't take a PhD to comprehend the extent of excess priced into stocks currently - no matter what Maria B tries to tell us.

Everyone knows that for the better part of the past year Apple was the world's biggest company by market cap. Most also know that AAPL aggressively uses all legal tax loopholes to pay as little State and Federal tax as possible, despite being one of the world's most profitable companies. Many know, courtesy of our exclusive from September, that Apple also is the holding company for Braeburn Capital: a firm which with a few exceptions, also happens to be among the world's largest hedge funds, whose function is to manage Apple's massive cash hoard with virtually zero reporting requirements, and whose obligation is to make sure that AAPL's cash gets laundered legally and efficiently in a way that complies with prerogative #1: avoid paying taxes. What few if any know, is that as part of its cash management obligations, Braeburn, and AAPL by extension, has conducted a mindboggling $600 billion worth of gross notional trades in just the past four years, consisting of buying and selling assorted unknown securities, or some $250 billion in 2012 alone: a grand total which represents some $1 billion per working day on average, and which puts the net turnover of some 99% of all hedge funds to shame! Finally, what nobody knows, except for the recipients of course, is just how much in trade commissions AAPL has paid on these hundreds of billions in trades to the brokering banks, many (or maybe all) of which may have found this commission revenue facilitating AAPL having a "Buy" recommendation: a rating shared by 52, or 83% of the raters, despite the company's wiping out of one year in capital gains in a few short months.

With the Dell LBO potentially heralding the renaissance of re-leveraging risk transfer from equity-holders to credit-holders, Goldman's screen among investment grade and high-yield companies attempts to uncover the names most likely to engage in shareholder-friendly (or more specifically bond-holder unfriendly) events. From quantitative screens on cashflow, leverage, and cash to stock 'cheapness', industry suitablity, and management reputation, the following 47 names warrant further attention (in both CDS and equity markets).

The credit markets this week already look very different to how they ended last year. As BofAML's Barnaby Martin notes, beta-compression, flatter curves and credit outperformance versus equity have all been abundant themes of late. Relative value is still there, when one looks closely, but is unfortunately not what it used to be. He adds that "things in credit have started to feel a lot like 2007 again," and while he believes the trend is set to continue (though slower) and the liquidity-flooded fundamentals in the high-yield bond market have been holding up well, it is trends in the leveraged loan market, that continue to deteriorate, that are perhaps the only canary in the coal-mine worth watching as global central bank liquidity merely slooshes to the highest spread product in developed markets (until that is exhausted). The rolling 12m bond default rate among European high-yield issuers fell to 1.8% in December, whereas loan default rates rose to 8.5%. With leverage rising, the hope for ever more greater fools continues, even as everyone is forced into the risky assets.

New Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pledge to spur inflation to 2 percent at the end of the yen’s appreciation means Japanese pension funds now have to hedge against rising prices and a currency decline after two decades of stagnation. Japanese pension funds are set to diversify some of their massive holdings, worth nearly $3.4 trillion into gold bullion. Corporate pension funds in Japan will diversify 72 trillion yen in assets after domestic stocks produced little return in the past two decades, according to Daiwa Institute of Research. “Bullion’s role as an inflation hedge, long ignored by Japanese fund operators, has come under the spotlight thanks to Abe’s economic policy,” Toshima, who now works as an adviser to pension-fund operators, said in an interview today in Tokyo. “Gold may be a standard asset-class in the portfolio of Japanese pension funds as Abe’s target is realized.”

A complete & thorough explanation of how many (if not most) levered college diplomas are overvalued assets with fictitious values - that's including you too HBS and the ivy league! No wonder the education bubble in the US is about to collapse.

Truly ironic - anyone receiving a REAL business/finance education would be able to run these rudimentary calculations themselves, thereby invalidating the very diploma they are seeking

Over the last few years, and at an increasing pace as of more recently, unions have become more and more confident of their ability to effect change and taken much more aggressive activist positions against the capitalist oppressors. The most recent examples range from California cities to Twinkies-maker Hostess Brands, and each time the stance from the unions appears to have been far more aggressive (and M.A.D. prone) than in the past. The question is why? Perhaps, as we tweeted following Hostess' liquidation:

Will the broke PBGC step in and fund Hostess' 18,000 workers suddenly vaporized pensions?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 16, 2012

...It is the confidence of an all-powerful government at their back with the US Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which is the backstop for private sector plans, providing cover. The problem is, as UBS explains, the PBGC has a huge deficit and is cashflow negative. This leads us to the uncomfortable expectation of further USD government support (bailout) or a more direct monetization by the Fed. PBGC could be impacted severely if a few large firms terminate their pensions. In this case, UBS expects PBGC to sell equities and buy long duration fixed income.

Bigger Tax Payer Bank Bailouts Cometh? If You Think Taxes Are Gonna Be Higher You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet! I welcome one and all to show me how it will not be so.

The last time the USD closed down (DXY -1%) on the week, and so did stocks (Dow/S&P/Nasdaq -0.25%), was the week heading into QE3 which marked the top of the US equity market for the year. With contracts rolling, the futures were roiling into the close as they were ping-ponged between new week lows and VWAP. The Dow Transports stood alone in their outperformance +1.1% (but were sliding rapidly into the close) and while most sectors were weak (Discretionary worst -1.2%), Materials outperformed (+1.66%) in a world of their own today. Silver slumped 2.4% on the week while Oil added 1% with gold flatlining since yesterday morning down around 0.5% on the week. AAPL, obviously, was the story today -7.75% in last 3 days to 10 month lows on huge volume today. EUR strength (+1.75%) dragged USD lower but was stymied by JPY weakness (-1.25%) as Treasury yields came off the week's highs to end 7-9bps higher on the week. VIX at two-week highs closed above Europe for the first time this year. Some peculiar volume and behavior in bond ETFs to note also (HYG saw biggest 2-day drop in a month) - markets feel very brittle up here.