Lehman

Revenue growth that has finally turned a historic corner, because while on the last day of 2014 there was still some hope that S&P500 sales will still grow even if at a very muted pace, as of Friday - for the first time since Lehman - full year revenue growth is now projected to turn negative!

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”  
- Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince July 9, 2007

"Depressingly, our instinct is that those new forecasts are more likely too conservative than too aggressive. Longer-term, sweet dreams really aren't made of this."
- Citigroup Strategist Hans Lorenzen February 20, 2015

Jon Corzine had an illustrious career in investment banking, rising to the very top of Goldman Sachs, until he got pushed out in 1999. He subsequently decided to try his luck in politics, and was eventually elected as a Senator from New Jersey in 2001, then Governor in 2006. After losing to Chris Christie in 2010, Corzine was promptly hired as the CEO of MF Global. He was back in the game of finance - and with something to prove. While the majority of voters in New Jersey breathed a sigh of relief, the clients of MF Global could not imagine the disaster that would unfold.

A bank which has €54.7 trillion, or a little over $62 trillion at today's exchange rate, in derivatives - a number that is 20 times greater than the GDP of Germany -  just failed a central bank stress test due to lacking governance and risk management controls and, just maybe, has insufficient capital? What can possibly go wrong.

Following January's crash in Philly Fed from 21-year highs to 12-month lows, expectations among the Keynesian-gazers was for a mean-reverting bounce... it didn't. Falling for the 3rd month in a row, Philly Fed printed a worse-than-expected 5.2 (against 8.43 exp), its lowest in a year. New Orders tumbled to its lowest in a year but most critically, "hope" - the six-month forward outlook index  - tumbled from 50.9 to 29.7 - the biggest MoM drop since lehman.

Once upon a time, Caterpillar was the world's industrial bellwether and a Dow Jones Industrial staple. Lately, in addition to suddenly developing a very close relationship with Federal authorities who "are investigating the movement of cash among Caterpillar Inc. ’s U.S. and overseas subsidiaries", CAT has become a completely ignored and forgotten poster name of the "old-economy" (the on in which cash flow still mattered). However, there are those who still  believe that the second coming "eyeballs" as the only valuation term category is destined to end in tears, and as such care about how companies like CAT do. Sadly, we have some more bad news: Caterpillar just reported that in January, it suffered its worst retail sales month since Lehman, with global sales plunging 14% from last January.

According to IMF researcher Brad Jones, who wrote "Asset Bubbles: Re-thinking Policy for the Age of Asset Management", the "business risk of asset managers acts as strong motivation for institutional herding and "rational bubble-riding." This is a critical observation, and one which suggests that the mere groupthink of massive asset managers is what leads to not only herding, lack of originality and the "hedge fund hotel" phenomenon, but also to recurring and ever greater asset bubbles. As Jones further writes, "subdued leverage is not a sufficient condition for financial stability—if systemic risk, and activity in the wider economy, is shaped importantly by large shifts in risk premia owing to the "rational herding" motivations of asset managers."

EU leaders were proposing capital controls, border controls, and even limiting the amount of money that could be removed from ATMs throughout Europe back in 2012.  They'll do it again.

Since the Great Financial Crisis, the only two categories that have seen a net increase in debt are Student and Auto Loans.

The stock market continues to flirt with new record highs, but the signs that we could be on the precipice of the next major financial crisis continue to mount.  There are multiple warning signs that have popped up repeatedly just prior to previous financial crashes, and many of those same warning signs are now appearing once again.

We were almost eager to swallow the blue pill and admit that the "recovery" is an actual recovery this time (non-GAAP that is, one where all the economic data is first excluded)... and then we happened to glance at this chart, courtesy of Citigroup's Matt King.

the latest news out of the West Coast is not good for anyone hoping for a quick resolution to the congestion problem. According to Reuters, after the clogged ports briefly reopened on Friday after a daylong closure, "shippers planned to re-impose a partial shutdown through the holiday weekend barring a settlement in stalled labor talks with the dockworkers union."

China's January credit data hints that in some ways China is becoming like the US, and as ever more newly created credit money ends up in the stock market, is China about to follow the US and Europe and suffer a collapse in monetary velocity. Because whereas previously the biggest asset bubble in China was that of housing, now it is the stock market, which means that suddenly its monetary system is for all intents and purposes haunted by the same issues that affect western markets. So how long until China, too, which is battling both deflation and economic contraction, proceeds with outright monetary devaluation?

Import prices dropped 8.0% YoY (modestly beating expectations of an 8.9% plunge) and 2.8% MoM. The last time import prices started to fall at this pace was a month after Lehman Brothers BK'd. Of course the crash of oil prices is largely responsible as imported fuel costs slumped 16.9% YoY - the most since Dec 2008 (petroleum -17.7%). However, even away from that the price of imported capital goods collapsed the most since March 2009 with the biggest rise in Japanese (foreign central banks) exported deflation since April 2013 (when QE really accelerated).

The bond market may have gotten so fragmented in recent months that even Bloomberg was amazed at how little trading volume it necessary to make a price impact, the amount of bond traders (and certainly salesmen), and certainly their bonuses, appeared to only go up. "Appeared" being the key word, however, because as Bloomberg reports, "the average number of dealers providing prices for European corporate bonds dropped to a low of 3.2 per trade last month, down from 8.8 in 2009, according to data compiled by Morgan Stanley."