Muni Bonds

The budget for "rat fees" comes to $125m.

In part one of our series we discussed stock to flow dynamics and their impact on the gold price. In part two of our series we discussed how 'paper gold' - meaning ETF’s, futures and various derivatives - simulate flow where none actually exists. In the final segment of this series we want to explore an important signal that could identify the demise of paper gold and/or signal a loss of confidence in the US Dollar and cause an abrupt increase in the stock-to-flow ratio and the physical gold price. Of the several periods of backwardation in the gold market, two of the most interesting and significant followed the September, 1999 Central Bank “Washington Agreement” on Gold and more recently during the dark days of the 2008 financial crisis. In both instances we believe the primary force causing gold backwardation was near catastrophic collapse in counterparty viability.

Eleven states made Forbes' list of danger spots for investors including California, New York, Illinois, and Ohio. They warned (and with the cliff it is even more critical), if you have muni bonds in these states - clean up your portfolio; if your career takes you there - rent, don't buy! Two factors determine their list of 'fiscal hellholes'. The first is whether there are more takers (someone who draws money from the government) than makers (the gainfully employed). The second is a state credit-worthiness score (via Conning) based on large debts, uncompetitive business climates, weak home prices, and bad trends in employment. Conning rates North Dakota the safest state to lend money to, Connecticut the most hazardous. A state qualifies for the Forbes' death spiral list if its taker/maker ratio exceeds 1.0 and it resides in the bottom half of Conning’s ranking. See below for the 11 states to avoid...no matter what Bob Toll, Larry Yun, Bob Pisani, or Alexandra Lebenthal tells you..

Folks, the political game has changed in the US. The Fed is no longer invulnerable. In this climate more QE cannot possibly happen. End of story. Indeed, if the Fed were to launch QE at any time between now and the election, Obama is DONE. The last possibly chance for QE without it being a clear hand-out to Obama (and a gift from the political gods to Romney) was June. The Fed passed on that.

A New York City story

#444444; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">Since Chinese local governments, unlike the U.S. municipality, do not have the option of filing for bankruptcy, Beijing most likely would need to do a great bailout of local authorities either in installments or at one fell swoop

For the first time since 1949, when the Communist Party took power, China will open the regional authority debt markets (muni markets) to the public. Much is being made of the fact that this first issuance - for Shanghai no less - enabled it to dramatically cut its interest expense - as investors were clearly comforted by the increasingly transparent documentation. However, we worry that that this will cause a multi-tier market to evolve very rapidly between the haves and have-nots as we suspect the more than 6000 companies set up by local governments will bifurcate just as the Chinese IPO market did in the US. Color us even more skeptical but when we read the Wall Street Journal's story on Wenzhou's Annus Horribilis this evening, even vibrant thriving (over-stretched and over-levered) city-states are feeling the recoupling pain of a European recession, US residential construction depression, and European bank deleveraging impacting credit conditions in Asia. The bottom-line is more openness is better, more transparency is better, and meeting the demands of yield hungry money managers is reasonable but we hope they go in with eyes wide open as we suspect this move is much more about $1.7tn risk transfer from the public central planner's balance sheet and on to the private capital markets of the world.

We noted, in September, that corporate bond downgrades were outpacing upgrades very notably and today we get the other side of that with Moody's noting that in Q3, Muni downgrades outweighed upgrades by the most since the financial crisis began. At 5.3 to 1, the third quarter of 2011 had the highest downgrade-to-upgrade ratio of any quarter for the U.S. public finance sector since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

"A rapid deterioration in credit metrics led to a higher-than-average 14 multi-notch downgrades."

The markets are signaling price declines all over the place.  Platinum is trading about $40/ounce below gold. This is anomalous. MIT's Billion Prices Project reported price declines in the U.S. in August (see final chart). The Economic Cycle Research Institute on Friday took the rare step of commenting in print that the stock market is at a significant risk for a further decline. Dangerously, Markit's CMBX index (or, more precisely, some of their constituent indices) that tracks mortgage-backed securities broke Friday to yet another new multi-year low.

Right now, the only investment opportunities I see that are both relatively attractive vis-a-vis the alternatives and offer a likelihood of growing nominal capital are investment grade municipal bonds.

So we all know that gold prices and UST 10Y yields are as high, and low, respectively, as they have ever been. This is nothing more or less than human adrenaline overriding reason and logic, driving return expectations to the distribution of max entropy. It’ll pass. Sometimes it makes sense to fight the crazy impulses of greed and fear. But often this gets you creamed in the center. Sometimes it doesn’t. For those times, the prices of straightforward hedges like 10Y Ts and gold make them very unhedge-worthy. There is no sense in jumping on trades that already have the risk premium baked in. The alternative is to ride the apocalypse with an eye on the relative mispricing of extremal points. I’m creating what I call a braided basket to do this. I’ll take two pair trades and go short the rapier points of the apocalypse and long something correlated, but underperforming it. In this way I’ll catch some hedge on tail risks on my core book due to the darkening outlook. At the same time, I’ll catch some cover when people come back to their senses. Why braided? Check out the charts, and see how the pairs interweave.

On all fronts, this debt story feels like the swirling motion is starting.

Courtesy of the recently declassified Fed discount window documents, we now know that the biggest beneficiaries of the Fed's generosity during the peak of the credit crisis were foreign banks, among which Belgium's Dexia was the most troubled, and thus most lent to, bank. Having been thus exposed, many speculated that going forward the US central bank would primarily focus its "rescue" efforts on US banks, not US-based (or local branches) of foreign (read European) banks: after all that's what the ECB is for, while the Fed's role is to stimulate US employment and to keep US inflation modest. And furthermore, should the ECB need to bail out its banks, it could simply do what the Fed does, and monetize debt, thus boosting its assets, while concurrently expanding its excess reserves thus generating fungible capital which would go to European banks. Wrong. Below we present that not only has the Fed's bailout of foreign banks not terminated with the drop in discount window borrowings or the unwind of the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, but that the only beneficiary of the reserves generated were US-based branches of foreign banks (which in turn turned around and funnelled the cash back to their domestic branches), a shocking finding which explains not only why US banks have been unwilling and, far more importantly, unable to lend out these reserves, but that anyone retaining hopes that with the end of QE2 the reserves that hypothetically had been accumulated at US banks would be flipped to purchase Treasurys, has been dead wrong, therefore making the case for QE3 a done deal. In summary, instead of doing everything in its power to stimulate reserve, and thus cash, accumulation at domestic (US) banks which would in turn encourage lending to US borrowers, the Fed has been conducting yet another stealthy foreign bank rescue operation, which rerouted $600 billion in capital from potential borrowers to insolvent foreign financial institutions in the past 7 months. QE2 was nothing more (or less) than another European bank rescue operation!

Sounds good, but it will backfire. It's not the billionaires who will pay.

There are many ways this can end badly and only a few it can end well.

• More from the Oracle: Central Banks Grapple With Competing Forces (Hilsenrath)
• U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant (NYT)
• China’s Rate Tightening Threatens Copper (FT)
• Fed’s Biggest Foreign-Bank Bailout Saved U.S. Muni Bonds (Bloomberg)
• NATO Blamed as Libyan Rebels Flee Assault By Qaddafi Forces (Bloomberg)
• Government Shutdown Looms Despite Obama's Intervention (Reuters)
• Another "brilliant" HFT "fix": SEC Unveils 'Limit' Curbs to Prevent 'Flash Crash' (WSJ)
• Ouattara forces storm Gbagbo bunker in Ivory Coast (Reuters)
• U.S. Fiscal Crisis in Spitting Distance (Laurence Kotlikoff)