Lehman

The total market capitalization of China's stocks is now over 40% the size of the US stock market and topped $10 trillion for the first time in history. This represents at 8-fold increase in Chinese market cap since Lehman. But after that initial pop, Chinese stocks are weak too. Meanwhile in other markets the EUR is notably lower against the JPY and USD but appears to be protected from a plunge for now hovering at 138.40 and 1.1200 respectively after the Greek Deal failure news. US equity futures are tumbling, down 9 points but off the initial lows for now.

"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."

And just like that, Goldman wins again.

Looking back at the Lehman Brothers collapse of 2008, it’s amazing how quickly it all happened. In hindsight there were a few early-warning signs, but the true scale of the disaster publicly unfolded only in the final moments before it became apparent that Lehman was doomed. Could this happen to Deutsche Bank?

Approximately two years ago, a commentary was published entitled “The One Bank”. The empirical foundation for the article (and the paradigm) was an extensive computer model, produced by a trio of academics at a university in Switzerland, and originally reviewed in an article from Forbes.

Is Deustche Bank the next Lehman is likely the wrong question to be asking. Is Lehman the template for European banking may be more to the point. Take it from the guy that called the Lehman debacle 5 months before the fact.

For a sense of what is driving sentiment this morning look no further than the Athens stock market which exploded higher yesterday on a Bloomberg story based on "two sources" that Germany was willing to compromise, only to close just as the IMF pulled a classis bad cop and announced it was halting work on Greece, and before further news from Bild that Germany was preparing for a Greek default while Europe had given Greece 24 hours to submit a final, workable proposal. As a result, it tumbled promptly at the open even as optimism persists and since the opening plunge, Greek stocks have continued to climb and are now back to yesterday's euphoric opening levels.

Gold bugs weren’t wrong - just super early. If central banks ever got religion and pulled a Volcker and hiked rates to the moon, it would be a remarkably bad time to hold gold. However, throughout history, there have been times where people were very sad that they didn’t own gold. We talk about one of them here. It’s very real, and the history of fiat currencies is also quite sad.

While Pope Francis has called for an end of "the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy," The Vatican City has been forced into sharing information with the US. Despite the oft-quoted Book of Proverbs prose that "[T]he borrower becomes the lender's slave," in the case of the world's largest borrower - the US government - it still acts like everyone’s master, including dictating the most ridiculous terms on financial agreements like this.

Bloomberg's Consumer Comfort Index dropped to its lowest since November having fallen 9 straight weeks (despite all that exuberant equity market hope). Under the covers the situation is even more worrisome as the US consumer propensity to 'buy' has crashed by the most since Lehman. The drop in high income earners' comfort continues to diverge from the new highs in stocks...

After a Chinese session which following the MSCI failure to include Chinese stocks in its EM index, if only for the time being, was largely a dud with Shanghai stocks actually dropping by 0.1% after a late day selloff, eyes turned to Europe, which once again did not disappoint and where the bond rout continued apace, with the 10Y Bund yield spiking just after the European open, and rising above 1.05%, the widest level since September 19, before recouping some losses and trading just around 1.00% at last check.

We should not even want to rebuild the world as it was in the decade of the 2000’s because it was so unbelievably unstable, a fact revealed persistently in the nearly eight years since that peak. Economists and central bankers treated the Panic of 2008 and the Great Recession as if it were a temporary interruption in an otherwise healthy system, a cyclical problem that over time heals on its own. Most of them still, to this day, hold the same view and the world’s economy and financial system is paying the costs of doing so. The eurodollar economy is falling apart and no amount of orthodoxy can reverse it because the eurodollar economy is orthodoxy.

The Fed and other Central Banks not only don’t have a clue how to fix the problem, but that they actually have almost no incentive to do so. 

"Central bank distortions have forced investors into positions they would not have held otherwise, and forced them to be the ‘same way round’ to a much greater extent than previously... unless fundamentals move so as to justify current valuations, when central banks move towards the exit, investors will too.... The way out may not prove so easy; indeed, we are not sure there is any way out at all."

Dear Mr Hilsenrath and your Central Bank Team,

This is Joe from the disappearing Middle Class in America.  You asked me the other day to drop you a note if I felt that something was wrong.  What I’m having trouble with is “why” you’re asking me if anything is wrong!?

So let me explain.