Monetary Policy

When it comes to soliciting opinions, the NY Fed in general, and former Goldmanite Bill Dudley in particular, care about just one group of "advisors" - the Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets (a group created in July 2009 after the 2008 market crash) also known as the billionaires who run the country's biggest hedge funds, prop desks and PE firms, including JPM, Credit Suisse, Apollo, Blackrock, Blue Mountain, Brevan Howard, Tudor, Fortress, and lo and behold, David "Balls to the Wall" Tepper.

Today's most anticipated event at tthis year's Jackson Hole event was the panel on "Global Inflation Dynamics", not because there is any core inflation in the world (at least not in the way the CPI measures it), especially not now that China is finally in the deflation exporting business, but because the most important speaker at this year's Jackson Hole, Fed vice chairman Stanley Fischer, alongside BOE's Mark Carney, the ECB's Constancio and the RBI's Raguram Rajan, would comment. Moments ago he just did, and courtesy of Market News, here are the highlights.

Dollar recovered from the exaggerated panic at the start of last week.  Outlook is still constructive.  Here is an overview of the technical condition of currencies, bonds, oil , and S&P 500.  

"The PBoC’s actions are equivalent to an unwind of QE, or in other words Quantitative Tightening. The potential for more China outflows is huge [and] the bottom line is that QT has much more to go. It is hard to become very optimistic on global risk appetite until a solution is found to China’s evolving QT."

The private economy and its millions of savers exist for the convenience of the apparatchiks who run the central bank. In their palpable fear and unrelieved arrogance, would they now throw millions of already ruined retirees and savers completely under the bus? Yes they would.

The size of the epic RMB carry trade could be as high as $1.1 trillion. If China were to liquidate $1 trillion in reserves (i.e. USTs) in order to stabilize the yuan in the face of the carry unwind, it would effectively offset 60% of QE3 and put around 200 bps of upward pressure on 10Y yields. So in effect, China's UST dumping is QE in reverse - and on a massive scale.

As Bloomberg reports, "China has cut its holdings of U.S. Treasuries this month to raise dollars needed to support the yuan in the wake of a shock devaluation two weeks ago, according to people familiar with the matter. Channels for such transactions include China selling directly, as well as through agents in Belgium and Switzerland, said one of the people, who declined to be identified as the information isn’t public. China has communicated with U.S. authorities about the sales."

Update: China readies new bailout mechanism - pooling CNY2 Trillion of Pension funds for "investment"

A busy night in AsiaPac before China even opens. Vietnam had a failed bond auction, Japanese data was mixed (retail sales good, household spending bad, CPI just right), Moody's downgrades China growth (surprise!), China re-blames US for global market rout, and then the big one hits - China's bailout fund needs more money (applies for more loans from banks) - in other words - The PBOC just got a margin call. China margin debt balance fell for 8th straight day (although the short-selling balance picked up to 1-week highs). China unveiled some economic reforms - lifting tax exemption and foreign real estate investment rules. PBOC fixesds the Yuan 0.15% stronger - most since March, but even with last night's epic intervention, SHCOMP looks set for its worst week since Lehman.

"Despite a slight tightening in the maize carryover, global grain stocks are forecast at 447m t, a 29-year peak."

With prices and valuations elevated, and earnings deteriorating, the backdrop for a continued "ripping bull-market" is at risk. The problem for the "perma-bulls" is that the deflationary backwash, combined with already weak economic fundamentals, continues to erode the ability for earnings to meet elevated future expectations. It is likely earnings will continue to disappoint in the quarters ahead and put further downward pressure on asset prices to close the current gap between "financial fantasy" and "economic realities."

"China's exchange rate reform had nothing to do with the global stock market volatility, it was mainly due to the upcoming U.S. Federal Reserve monetary policy move," Yao said. "We were wronged."

Crash waves are notoriously volatile – several of the biggest one day rallies in history have occurred before and during crash waves. This makes short term forecasting even more of a coin flip than it normally is. However, we believe it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees; stock markets around the world have been in bubbles driven by extremely loose monetary policy, which ipso facto allows us to identify them as an example of artificial price distortion. Such bubbles always collapse sooner or later – unless the monetary authority decides to simply destroy the currency it issues, as has happened in Zimbabwe and is currently happening in countries like Venezuela and to a slightly lesser extent Argentina. We don’t expect the central banks of the developed nations to follow suit, at least not yet.

In the past week, ever since the Fed's FOMC minutes which sent the S&P tumbling from 2100 to their lows in the overnight session, some 13% lower, the US economy underwent the functional equivalent of a 15 bps rate hike, or more than half the rate hike that the Fed has been so terrified to engage in for years.

Lost in all the stock market focus is the renewed disaster being signaled across credit markets, “inflation” expectations in particular. Here oil prices and the “dollar’s” darkening intersect with credit and broad financial settings. Quietly, market-based measures of the anticipated future “inflation” path have crashed. It can no longer be transitory, which extrapolates nowhere good for monetary policy, orthodox economics and the actual global economy. The theme for several years now has been that “they don’t know what they are doing” and once more we find that proven by “unexpected” events that were perfectly predictable outside the orthodox bubble.

"Policymakers responded to the financial crisis with easy monetary policy and low interest rates. The critics — including us — argued against 'solving a debt crisis with more debt.' Put differently, we said that QE was necessary, but not sufficient for a recovery. We are now coming to the moment of reckoning: central bankers look naked, and markets have nothing else to believe in."