New Normal

We have long been pounding the table on what in our view is the biggest detriment to any future growth for not only corporate America, but the entire US (where, sadly, government investment IRRs just happen to be negative - a fact that most won't understand until it is too late, especially not self-anointed economic wisemen whose only solution to everything is "do more of the same" yet who thought the utility of the Internet would be eclipsed by that of the fax machine): the complete lack of capital expenditures at the corporate level, and lack of (re)investment spending. It turns out that, however, that there is more to the story, and as the following chart from SocGen's Albert Edwards shows, not only are companies using up what actual free cash flows they have for such stupid stock boosting gimmicks such as harebrained M&A (just look at the recent fiasco between HP and Autonomy to see how rushed M&A always ends), and of course buybacks, but they are now levering to the hilt to do even more of this. The last time they did this? The golden days of the credit bubble.

Something odd popped up while going through the weekly H.6 update...

Today's AAPL move, on no news, is as of this moment a $35+ move in one trading session, or a $30+ billion market cap move in one trading session, and a nearly $60 move from the Friday lows. As the histogram below shows, in absolute terms, this is the second largest intraday move up in the stock in the past two years, and a 4 sigma move for a stock which has moved 7% on a 1.7% standard deviation, for no other reason than the "stock is oversold" or whatever other narrative those who put narratives to stock moves have ascribed to it today. And with HFT's determining valuation based on momentum, RSI, Bollinger bands, and other meaningless New Normal technicals, we have just gone from massively oversold, to massively-er overbought.

Equities closed the day-session near the highs of the day as OPEX shenanigans were evident everywhere. Early and ugly macro data was swept under the proverbial carpet (as it is transitory Sandy effects?), the ubiquitous European-close trend reversal started us higher, and then platitudes from D.C., and a late-day Fed-Head jawbone did the rest on a day when AAPL saw its largest volume in 8 months and pinned between 520 and 530 VWAPs. Risk assets did not follow the path of most exuberance that stocks did on the day (surprise). Credit tracked with stocks today in general but remains an underperformer on the week. Oil was the week's big beta winner with the USD (despite underlying dispersion in EUR and JPY) and Treasuries rather dull. Gold sagged but by the close today the S&P 500 had recoupled with the barbarous relic on a beta basis. VIX compressed (exciting some that are incapable of comprehending a term structure) as put overlays were unwound into OPEX (and given the VWAP/volume moves it would seem AAPL saw hedges taken down and exposure reduced). Red week as stocks continue to catch down to bond's new normal.

Between the escalation in the Middle East and Olli Rehn pouring cold-water on the hopes and prayers of an imminent Spanish rescue-request, sovereign bond risk rose notably today. A late-day rampapalooza in EURUSD (another round of end-of-day repatriation?) signaled risk-on in the correlated monkeys and sure enough (in the US and Europe) stocks rose into the European close. The USD is remarkably unchanged on the week - despite the volatility in risk assets in general (zee stabilitee at the 1.27 peg seems the new normal) - as the Fed/ECB 'agreement' appears to have crushed the life out of yet another market-based signal - as EURUSD implied vol crashes to five-year lows.

It wouldn't be the New Normal if the basket case that is Europe, and its amusingly named "Union", didn't somehow manage to trip over itself. This is precisely what happened last night at the European finance ministers meeting after IMF head Lagarde and pathological liar and chair of the Europe's mostly broke Finance Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, openly disagreed with each other, an event even the FT called a "feud" after they proposed two alternative visions for Greece, one which envisioned the 120% debt/GDP debt target goal pushed forward to 2022 (for Juncker), and on the other hand, IMF, which has been humiliated enough with its horrible predictions, and which refuses to budge from its 2020 Greek target. Per the FT: "In a rare breach, Mr Juncker told a post-meeting press conference the target would be moved to 2022, prompting Ms Lagarde to insist the IMF was sticking to the original timeline. When Mr Juncker again insisted it would be moved – “I’m not joking,” he said – Ms Lagarde appeared exasperated, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. “In our view, the appropriate timetable is 120 per cent by 2020,” Ms Lagarde said. “We clearly have different views.” Officials will meet again November 20 in an effort to reach agreement, Mr Juncker said. Despite the delay, officials insisted Greece would not default on Thursday, when Athens must make a debt payment of about €5bn without the benefit of international aid." Nothing like total coordination and organization within a monetary union that may not exit if Greece does not make its November 16 bond payment, which it likely will, by issuing debt and forcing the ECB to accept it as eligible collateral so that Greece can roll the maturity. And concluding this hilarious incident was Juncker's statement this morning that there is "no real dispute" with the IMF. When it gets serious...

There was one, just one, country that escaped the bankster Mutually Assured Destruction singularity force field in 2009 and after destroying the financial overhang and starting from scratch, has become a paragon of growth in the New Global Depressionary Normal. Iceland (profiled most recently here). As such, what Iceland says is signal, and what the legacy masters of the abovementioned New Normal repeat day after day, is recurring noise. Here is the signal: when Icelanders were asked if they should join the EU, this is what they responded:

• YES - 27.3%
• NO - 57.6%

Q.E.D.

Retirement-Off! The Dow just crossed back under the magical 13,000 level for the first time in two months...Having crossed this rubicon for the first time on Februray 21st, we can reflect on eight months well spent... and the sound of millions of retirees sifting through the 'Help Wanted' pages is deafening - as those 'young-people' that voted for change will continue to participate less in the workforce.

Tonight it's all Obama-corns and Biden-faeries but the market is already 'adjusting' to the new old new normal regime. Unfortunately in 'Obama II - This Time Its Different' the odds of going over the Fiscal Cliff just got real. As we noted here (and in more detail here and here), there is now a 55% chance we go over the cliff (given the status quo of no compromise) and the market is a long way from pricing that kind of GDP shock...

As so often happens, the conventional wisdom said to buy every day ahead of the election day because the S&P would surge and peak with the election. Conventional wisdom was wrong. Which is to be expected: in the New Normal one should take any technical signal or old trader wives tale, and do the opposite. Needless to say, the market now is unchanged from where it was two months ago, and from the day Barrons' came out with its latest top tick cover (as we said "here comes that patron saint of all contrarian indicators") page praising the "Teflon Market." So now that the "buy the election" meme is over and done with, what is there to look forward to for the rest of the year? According to Goldman, here comes the "sell ahead of the coming dividend and capital gains tax hike."

If you bought the deep OTM, high theta option that is the Greek stock market on October 1, or wheat on January 1, 2012, you can now retire. For everyone else who still hasn't gotten the hang of this here "New Normal" Cramer market, better luck next time.

"Obama/Romney, Romney/Obama – the most important election of our lifetime? Fact is they’re all the same – bought and paid for with the same money. Ours is a country of the SuperPAC, by the SuperPAC, and for the SuperPAC. The “people” are merely election-day pawns, pulling a Democratic or Republican lever that will deliver the same results every four years. “Change you can believe in?” I bought that one hook, line and sinker in 2008 during the last vestige of my disappearing middle age optimism. We got a more intelligent President, but we hardly got change. Healthcare dominated by corporate interests – what’s new? Financial regulation dominated by Wall Street – what’s new? Continuing pointless foreign wars – what’s new? I’ll tell you what isn’t new. Our two-party system continues to play ping pong with the American people, and the electorate is that white little ball going back and forth over the net. This side’s better – no, that one looks best. Elephants/Donkeys, Donkeys/Elephants. Perhaps the most farcical aspect of it all is that the choice between the two seems to occupy most of our time. Instead of digging in and digging out of this mess on a community level, we sit in front of our flat screens and watch endless debates about red and blue state theologies or listen to demagogues like Rush Limbaugh or his ex-cable counterpart Keith Olbermann."

It was only yesterday that we pointed out the ever decreasing halflives of central bank interventions. We are grateful that none other than the biggest intervention basket case of all came out and proved us 100% correct, when the BOJ announced none other than QE 9 just one month after the impact from QE 8 fizzled about 8 hours after it was disclosed. This time around, the destructive "benefit" to the JPY was negative from the first second, resulting in the first instance of monetary easing that.. wasn't. Japan just came up with a brand new New Normal concept: tightening through easing, when its ¥11 trillion intervention proved to be woefully insufficient for a market addicted to ever more liquidity injections.

While the much anticipated ramp into the elections has so far failed to materialize (confirming yet another "technical pattern" of the New Normal, namely that whatever most expect to happen, never happens), it is time to consider what impact a given administration - either Republican or Democrat - would have on the stock market. Fiscal cliff aside, whose overcoming will be very problematic in either case and will likely necessitate a market plunge a la August 2011 to be fully implemented, although more likely if Romney wins the presidency or there is a Democratic sweep, both outcomes which according to popular conventional wisdom and various online polling services have a less than 50% chance of occurring, it turns out that at the macro level there is absolutely no difference for the market whether the president is a republican or a democrat for stock returns one year after the election. As Goldman observes: "Since 1976, the S&P 500 has offered approximately 10% total returns in the twelve months following a presidential election, regardless of which party wins that election. Performance is also very similar over shorter three and six month windows. However, median returns are slightly better early in Republican administrations, while during an entire four year term the equity market has somewhat higher returns under Democrats." In other words, those who are unsure if to invest in the broad market based on who wins, should not have the party affiliation of the winner as a consideration, at least not as a key issue. Where there are, however, nuances is at the sector level, which is where those seeing to generate "presidential beta" should consider trading on.

"We have just spent 15 years learning that a policy of creating asset bubbles is a bad idea, so it is hard to imagine why the Fed wants to create another one. But perhaps the more basic question is: How fruitful is the wealth effect? Is the additional spending that these volatile paper profits are intended to induce overwhelmed by the lost consumption of the many savers who are deprived of steady, recurring interest income? We have asked several well-known economists who publicly support the Fed’s policy and found that they don’t have good answers. If Chairman Bernanke is setting distant and hard-to-achieve benchmarks for when he would reverse course, it is possibly because he understands that it may never come to that. Sooner or later, we will enter another recession. It could come from normal cyclicality, or it could come from an exogenous shock. Either way, when it comes, it is very likely we will enter it prior to the Fed having ‘normalized’ monetary policy, and we’ll have a large fiscal deficit to boot. What tools will the Fed and the Congress have at that point? If the Fed is willing to deploy this new set of desperate measures in these frustrating, but non-desperate times, what will it do then? We don’t know, but a large allocation to gold still seems like a very good idea."