New Normal

Here’s the crucial part of what Summers and Krugman are saying: this is not a temporary gig. This isn’t going to just “get better” on its own over time. This really is, as Mohamed El-Erian of PIMCO would call it, the New Normal. And if you’re Jeremy Grantham or anyone for whom a stock has meaning as a fractional ownership stake in a real-world company rather than as a casino chip that gives you “market exposure” … well, that’s really bad news...  Just don’t kid yourself into thinking that your deep dive into the value fundamentals of some large-cap bank has any predictive value whatsoever for the bank’s stock price, or that a return to the happy days of yesteryear is just around the corner. It doesn’t and it’s not, and even if you’re making money you’re going to be miserable and ornery while you wait nostalgically for what you do and what you’re good at to matter again. Spoiler Alert: Godot never shows up.

Even as the Dot-Com 2.0 exasperates to new highs, it seems Twitter - the darling of the no-profit-but-lots-of-hype recent IPOs - is losing its lustre. TWTR is down 4% today to new lows post-IPO. The catalyst for this latest slump appears to be a WSJ article about "fake accounts" - whocouldanode? Of course, it wouldn't be the new normal markets without an exchange 'breaking'... The NYSE and NYSE MKT cash equities markets is working to resolve an issue with customer connectivity.

And they're back:

2,277 sq.ft. - Median new-home size in 2007
2,306 sq. ft. - Median new-home size in 2012

Just as that crowning achievement of the last housing bubble, the McMansions, have once again returned with the second and final return of the Fed-blown housing bubble, the Bluths picked a perfect time to also come bac on the scene. But instead of analyzing the reasons for just why the US economy now desperately needs to jump from bubble to bubble, we will simply constrain ourselves to discussing... interior decoration. The infographic below from BusinessWeek shows how times, and tastes, how to decorate one's McMansion have changed in the past few years.

An Iran deal that is kinda sorta a deal but really is not a deal is all we need in the new normal to justify adding another few fractions onto the equity multiple valuation tree of hope. The S&P is up 9 points, Dow up 70 points, and WTI Crude is down around 1% on the news. Interestingly, stocks have no support from the almost ubiquitous carry traders as this appears more like a rip through the stop order stack more than another greater fool adding to their position.

Given the following chart, it is perhaps no surprise that the demand for iPhones in the US is higher than in the rest of the world. Forget about reaching for yield in CCC-rated cov-lite leveraged loans, ignore the latest internet no-profits-but-lots-of-eyeballs IPO, the real way to make money in the new normal is the 'iArbitrage'.

The assessment on the attached chart is very simple: as Stone McCarrthy puts it "this is an indication of an increase in structural unemployment." That statement is quite obvious to the millions of Americans who have been out of a job for years since the Lehman collapse, and have been unable to find a new job despite the plethora of "job openings." However, that's not all. What the implied unemployment rate based on the current level of Job Openings is, is even worse - because it is precisely at the 5.5% level where the Fed would not only taper, not only end QE but begin tightening!

Expenditure on social benefits in the EU fell to 29.1% of GDP in 2011 from 29.7% in 2009, Eurostat said yesterday. However, do not feel too bad for the broad European social state. While France (as one might expect) nears the top of the list with over 33% of GDP spent on "social benefits", Bloomberg's Niraj Shah notes that it is Denmark that spends the most on welfare at 34.3% of GDP, and Latvia spent the least, 15.1%. Of course, in the new normal, as in the US, retirees accounted for the majority of the trasnfer payments with an average of 46% of total expenditure while unemployment benefit accounted for 6%. Interestingly, Greece nears the top of the list with almost 31% of GDP spent on welfare.

In short: from January to September (we exclude the October 204K print as there is no matching JOLTS number yet) the average monthly jobs gain per the Non-farm Payrolls report is 184K. However, when looking at the implied job gains per the JOLTS Net Turnover, this number is a far more disturbing 150K, some 20% lower.

Someone must have had an odd sense of humor to name a conference in which the most prominent US hedge funds appear, after Robin Hood - it seems in the New Normal the prince of thieves takes from the Middle Class and gives... to himself. Snyde remarks aside, yesterday was Day 1 of the Robin Hood investor conference, with such speakers as David Einhorn and Dan Loeb putting on their best book-talking face and pitching their currently marketable ideas (which they have put on long ago and are likely selling into strength). Below is a summary of the top recommendations from Bloomberg.

For all purists still stuck in a world in which humans are the most efficient allocators of capital, and where, under Ben Bernanke's centrally-planned New Normal, shorting stocks has become blasphemy, the following table showing the monthly return of quant giant RenTec's chief equity fund open to the outside world, the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF B), whose AUM has ballooned to $8.7 billion in the past few years, will come as a shock. Because the quant strategy-driven fund, which does not look at fundamentals but purely at technical relationships and quant arbs, just posted its best month in history in October returning 8.65% nearly doubling the 4.60% return of the broader market. But the truly stunning aspect of RenTec's October performance is that it was not driven by a highly levered beta position (2x leverage on the S&P would do it easily) which is how virtually everyone else does it (a strategy that works great as long as the market is going higher), but instead thanks to that nearly forgotten aspect of a "hedge" fund's exposure - shorts.

John Fichthorn and his $500MM Dialectic Capital hedge fund may not be household names, but in a time when "fighting the Fed", i.e. trading on fundamentals and not on the Fed's balance sheet, is heresy, John may be the biggest bear around, maybe even bigger than Faber. He revealed as much in an interview earlier when he said that the current trading environment may be the shorting opportunity of a lifetime. To wit:  "we think the [shorting] opportunity with any kind of reasonable timeframe now is really the best we've seen since starting our firm ten years ago, and really since i've been doing this since 1995, and i was a short seller in the middle of the internet bubble, and in many ways, this is more compelling because it makes less sense."

Pushing the neo-liberal argument further than it wants to go, with interesting results. 

As reported earlier today, Paris was the latest city to succumb to a rogue shooter when a gunman shot a photographer at left-leaning French newspaper Liberation, following by a shooting near the  headquarters of French bank SocGen.  The lone gunman is shown on the picture below. How the Paris situation differs from numerous such incidents taking place recently in the US, however, is that so far the gunman has not been captured or otherwise "incapacitated." Furthermore, as was reported subsequently, the Paris prosecutors are now treating the shooting as a "terrorist" case. And now, as the WSJ reports, Paris in now gripped in a manhunt for the gunman who is currently on the loose.

In the near term, BofAML's Macneil Curry warns "we are growing a bit cautious/nervous, as US equity volatility is flashing a warning sign of market complacency that has often preceded a correction or a pause in trend." This 'red flag' is asterisk'd appropriately in the new normal with "to be clear, the balance of evidence is still very much US equity positive, but the near term downside risks have increased."

"Every American family deserves a false sense of security," said Chris Reppto, a risk analyst for Citigroup in New York. "Once we have a bubble to provide a fragile foundation, we can begin building pyramid scheme on top of pyramid scheme, and before we know it, the financial situation will return to normal." Despite the overwhelming support for a new bubble among investors, some in Washington are critical of the idea, calling continued reliance on bubble-based economics a mistake. Regardless of the outcome of this week's congressional hearings, however, one thing will remain certain: The calls for a new bubble are only going to get louder. "America needs another bubble," said Chicago investor Bob Taiken. "At this point, bubbles are the only thing keeping us afloat."