Market Crash

I'm putting together what I see as solutions for the many pricing and valuation problems that I see coming down the pike. If you think real asset markets are a little soft now, wait until rates are controlled more by market forces than by concerted central planning cartels.

Social unrest has already unseated several regimes in the Middle East. And the same formula that created those situations (tons of poor, repressed folks no longer able to afford food) exists today in China as well. With that in mind, expect the relationship between the US and China to deteriorate in the coming months. The flirtation underlying trade tensions (steel and tires) we’ve already seen will erupt into full-scale trade wars. We could very well even see an actual physical war the way things are heading.

The power elite that believe they can control the masses as puppet master commands a puppet should beware. The wrath of the masses can be fierce and sudden. Ask Hosni Mubarak. As Steinbeck realized many decades ago, selfishness run amok, supported and encouraged by the authorities lead to poverty, despair and sometimes revolution. The false mantra of an economy based on self-interest and free markets is a smokescreen blown by the few with wealth and power to obscure the truth that they have used their wealth and power to rig the game in their favor. The have-nots can dream about becoming a have, but the chances of achieving that dream today are miniscule. Steinbeck pointedly distinguishes between the selfishness of the moneyed class and the altruism of the working poor. In contrast to and in conflict with this policy of selfishness stands the migrants’ behavior toward one another. Aware that their livelihood and survival depend upon their devotion to the collective good, the migrants unite—sharing their dreams as well as their burdens—in order to survive. Those in control need to keep the masses divided. They need Americans to be distracted by phantom terrorist threats, inconsequential political differences, American Idol, Charlie Sheen, Lindsey Lohan and Lady Gaga. They need Americans to be focused on “I”. Their greatest fear is that the American people realize that “We” can change the direction of this country and bring the perpetrators of crimes against the people of this country to justice.

Though fundamentals may drive behavior in the long-term, fundamentals have had, at times, zero effect on the price discovery of assets in the short-term. At a time when everyone but the most naïve of the naïve understand how grossly distorted capital prices are both to the upside (in global stock markets) and to the downside (in gold and silver markets) due to massive manipulation schemes executed through collusive bullion-bank and government efforts, it makes zero sense to continue to put faith in technical analysis in a vacuum as well.

It’s the perfect set up for any investment: dwindling supplies and growing demand. The inflationary holocaust will only be adding gasoline to the fire, pushing agricultural commodities to record highs. As Jim Rogers puts it, “God knows how high the price of agriculture is going to go, so that's where I'm putting more of my money now than in other things… I think I'm going to make more money in agriculture than I make in precious metals.''

Courtesy of Gen Ben, we passed another landmark in rates: the 2s30s closed at an all time high of just over 400 bps. Ths is the widest closing spread in history. What does this mean? Simple: instead of taking the inverse method which has worked so well in equities, where banks make money through ever-increasing trading volumes (well not anymore) at the expense of margins, with ever more incursive electronic trading, the Criminal Reserve has decided to pull a Harry Winston and get banks to get their entire P&L from the least amount of transactions (in this case mortgages). Why so? Because as we pointed out recently, mortgage origination and refinancing volume has plunged to the lowest in a year. And with no volume, bankers are forced to make money increasingly more on spread from those who are desperate enough to go through the pain of the entire mortgage origination nightmare, even if (or especially) it means ending up with a mortgage that has no actual mortgage note (yes, that is a factor... in addition to mortgage rates that continue to be close to year highs). In other words expect to see the 2s30s to go even steeper until it is made obvious that banks will no longer make money on the curve. At which point it will be the Fed's obligation to go out and start buying up the long-end in mortgages, just like in March 2009. As stated before, we expect this, together with the required market crash to spawn QE 2.1+ Lite to occur some time in April, May, around the time the extra $195 billion in SFP liquidity is absorbed by the market. In the meantime, the Fed can only hope that stocks continue rising ever higher so as to have as great a buffer as possible from which to enter free fall. And 'trivial' events like Egypt are not allowed to stand in the way.

At the outset of the last century America was still a vital, free, growing country on the rise. The song of the century began as a joyous ballad and ended as a funeral dirge. The creation of a Central Bank, which could create inflation on demand, and allowing politicians the ability to buy votes through pork spending, paid for with ever increasing taxation, have sucked the life out of the American Dream...The Federal Reserve has not been alone in killing the American Dream. Politicians since 1913 have done their part in suffocating the dream. The tax code consisted of 400 pages in 1913 and tax rates ranged from 1% to 7%. In less than a century politicians of both parties have carved out 70,000 pages of payoffs, entitlements, and bribes for their contributors and constituents. Tax rates now range from 10% to 35%. Those 70,000 pages of rules, regulations and tax breaks do not benefit the average middle class American. They benefit those who had the money and power to buy off a Congressman.The Federal Reserve and the US Tax Code bastardized the American Dream, created barriers to economic advancement, and supported the accumulation of wealth and power by a select few. The ruling elite have used their power and control over the media to convince the majority of Americans that the American Dream is about accumulating material possessions with debt. The American Dream no longer meant attaining the fullest measure of your capabilities, but living in the biggest McMansion, driving the nicest BMW, watching the biggest TV and wearing the latest fashions, all acquired with debt. America is dying.

With Goldman's economic team having been subsumed by the Koolaid borg, lately we have been largely ignoring their once must read critical pieces, as the all out onslaught to prevent the ponzi collapse was started in November (we expect Hatzius to pull another 180 in April, just ahead of the May market crash which will lead right into QE 2+, but that is another story). This is a shame, because the team of Hatzius et al used to have insightful things to say. Alas, now all they do is cheerlead every single data point no matter how superficial or ugly the behind the headlines story is. Which is why we were pleasantly surprised to read the following research report by Goldman's Robin Brooks which discussed the consequence of the now seemingly inevitable tax holiday allowing multinationals to repatriate their cash without paying taxes. Following Obama's latest Wall Street corporatocratic hiring spree, we are now convinced that it is merely a matter of months if not weeks before this is announced. As such it will be a replay of the Homeland Investment Act of 2005. Oddly, this event has not be actively priced by the market. Goldman is correct that in all likelihood this will have a very dollar positive result, which likely explains precisely why the dollar has been allowed to drop so much against the euro, as the next leg will likely push the greenback well into the 1.20 range, if not lower. That this will happen just as the second round of European stress tests will only feed the flames of the EUR's collapse. The below piece examines Goldman's thinking of how this event will influence the EURUSD. Goldman, which is very client bullish on the EURUSD (and is therefore selling selling EURs in droves) states that it believes the likelihood of a HIA part 2 is very small, even as it frames the major strength the dollar would experience as a result. We agree with the latter and disagree with the former: one way or another, the Obama administration will need to get the $1+ trillion currently offshore. When that happens, watch as the EURUSD plunges to multi-year lows.

It was ten short days ago that the Bangaldesh stock exchange was closed for the 2nd time in a month, after it plunged by almost double digits in the span of minutes. Subsequently, it pulled as US-type flash crash, PPT-sponsored HFT recovery.... only to make third time the charm: BBC reports that earlier today the Bangladesh index fell 8.5%, or 587 points, which forced regulators to suspend trading.This is the third suspension in a about month and the second free fall plunge in January. Everyone in Asia is getting spooked by China's lack of liquidity. But not the US. We are all hoooou kay. But that's not all. The chery on top is that the Bangladesh regulator, which more than anything is in dire need of its own plunge protection team, or least GETCO to serve as "DMM" (wink wink) for the entire exchange, has suspended brokers for having the temerity to sell into today's collapse. In other words: next time someone tries to sell into a market plunge, tough luck.

No one knows exactly what events will transpire over the next 15 to 20 years as this Fourth Turning morphs from regeneracy to climax and finally to resolution. The mainstream media, most politicians, and self proclaimed progressives are blind to the cyclicality of history. They believe history proceeds in a linear upwards path. These are the people you see on TV talking about toning down the rhetoric, false gestures of bipartisanship, and soothing words about the financial crisis being a thing of the past. They fail to understand that once the mood of the country is catalyzed by a trigger event or events, there is no turning back the clock. Winter must be dealt with head on. Very few, if any, “financial experts” anticipated a housing collapse, followed by a deep recession, a 50% stock market crash, and a financial system which came within hours of total implosion on September 18, 2008 (as detailed in the documentary Generation Zero). Absolutely no one anticipated the extreme measures taken by the U.S. government and Federal Reserve to “Save” the country from a 2nd Great Depression. These measures have added $5 trillion to the National Debt in the last 40 months. It took 205 years to accumulate the 1st $5 trillion of debt.

Lately there has been a lot of chatter among the supposedly smarter-than-mainstream media that even should the debt ceiling not be raised, it would not mean the bankruptcy of America as interest payments would still be satisfied. While that technicality is absolutely true, it is even more absolutely irrelevant. What propagators of such theories forget is that lately there are just two exponential curve trendlines that are worth noting: that of the cumulative debt issuance, and of the US cumulative deficit (see chart below). Each month, the US issues around $50 billion more debt than is needed to just fund the deficit. This is debt that is on top of the debt that is needed to plug the different between revenues and expenditures. As Zero Hedge has pointed out repeatedly before, that ratio is already roughly 1 to 2, meaning for every dollar in revenue the US government issues more than one dollar of debt just to fund the deficit. And then some. As the chart below shows, in December alone the government issued $84.4 billion on top of the budget funding shortfall ($80 billion deficit and $164.4 billion in debt issuance)! So yes, while the Treasury can fund interest expense at record low interest levels, that is completely irrelevant. Unable to fund incremental expenses to the tune of hundreds of billions per month, the US government will shut down (a point when nobody will accept US government IOUs, not Social Security which passed the point of being self sustaining last year, and certainly not Medicare and Medicaid, and most certainly not private sector Defense Vendors) just like it did in 1995. Below, we present the key charts and the full report from a must read SocGen report on the sovereign debt crisis, titled Can It Happen Here? We urge all those who pretend to have an educated opinion on the US funding crisis to read this report before they open their mouths in public and once again validate their critics.

What a Year It Was! If you followed my pieces in Zero Hedge during 2010 you made a fortune. Nailing it with every asset class allocation. Only one small hickey from a short yen position.

The future of media lies in creating truly compelling content, not iPad apps or Flash gadgets. Let's get back to the old school when media outlets broke truly investigative stories and they reported the news in lieu of having it reported to them. Isn't there a reason why ZeroHedge is so successful with absence of iPhone app, flash animation, etc.?

Remember when double and even triple inverse leveraged ETFs were all the rage? That all occurred in the brief period of time before it became clear that Bernanke would first take down the global financial system before he let Citi get back to $1/share again. Apparently one reader recalls it all too well: "In 2008 at the bottom of the market I sold positions I owned in physical gold and banks stocks such as Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C) and also non financial companies such as Ford (F). I used these proceeds to purchased inverse ETF’s such as NYSE: FAZ (Direxion Financial 3x Short) and NYSE:SRS (Proshares Real Estate 2x Short). Since making these purchases, these ETF’s have suffered significant drops in value as reflected in their price. In fact NYSE: FAZ has plummeted from $1100 per share to $11 per share and SRS has reduced in price from $1000 per share to $19.50 per share. It is now apparent that the Fed spent trillions of dollars to raise the price of bank stocks and to inversely suppress the price of these inverse ETFs." Yet is this nothing but a case of fippers' remorse? Is there legal precedent for an actual claim? Was the Fed in breach of duty "by allowing investors to make investments into funds such as FAZ and SRS and other inverse ETF’s, while the Fed was performing transactions that the Fed knew or should have known would severely harm the investors in these publicly traded fund." Will Bernanke cave and make whole everyone who dared to put money into the market, even if it meant betting on a broad market decline? After all the whole purposes of the latest propaganda campaign is to get people to put money in the market with no fear of loss whatsoever: whether one is bullish or bearish (and as the lack of participation shows, most are certainly still bearish). Which is where it gets interesting: "Therefore, I appeal to your office to make due and just compensation in treble damages amounting to $__ million dollars for a full and good faith settlement of this matter. If this is agreeable, I am prepared to enter into a confidential good faith settlement." In our ridiculous bizarro world, in which nothing makes sense following each recurring Fed intervention, perhaps the Fed making whole those who lose money regardless of their bias, is just what is needed to break the 33 weeks of outflows...

We traditionally enjoy the periodic letters by Guggenheim's CIO Scott Minderd. His latest piece, "The Opening Act to the Broader Crisis" is no exception. In it, the strategist dissects the European crisis, compares it to the subprime debacle and sees it as the precursor to the eventual downfall of the euro, a surge in the dollar, the "federalization" of Europe and the adoption of QE by the ECB. The key must read item in the current report is Minerd thought experiment of what a  wholesale bank run, first in Ireland, and then everywhere else in Europe, would look like. This is especially important as one could, as Scott claims, start at any moment. What does this mean for investments? "If we are on the brink of crisis in Europe, which I believe we are, then there are several expectations we can draw about the investment landscape. First and foremost, the dollar will strengthen rapidly against the euro; U.S. Treasuries will rally; equity prices in Europe will fall; and credit spreads will widen, at least temporarily. In general, risk assets will experience choppier waters, especially as the crisis intensifies." Yet somehow this is a disconnect with the Guggenheimer's recent Barron's round table bullish statements on stocks and high yield bonds: "Let me be clear, I am not changing my mind on any of these investment theses, but a crisis in Europe will likely interrupt, but not derail, certain bullish trends at some point in 2011." It is ironic that Minerd brings up subprime as an analogy to Europe: after all his response is precisely the same that everyone else who appreciated the gravity of the subprime contagtion used at the time, starting with The Chairman. To wit "it is contained." All else equal, and it never is, we fail to see how a surge in the world's funding currency, the USD, will not generate an all our rout in every single risk asset, The Chairman's gushing liquidity notwithdtanding, due to trillions in short dollar funding positions.