New Normal

While hardly a factor in the Fed's thinking which is due to present its announcement in 4 hours, today's Initial claims report came at 382K, the biggest miss to expectations (370K) in 2 months, and up from last week's naturally upward revised claims of 367K. The 15K jump is the biggest weekly spike in 2 months and 4th largest this year. Just as relevantly, as we warned months ago, those on extended claims continue to run out at a fast pace, with 41K people losing their extended benefits, down by nearly 1.8 million from a year ago, and are forced to seek disability benefits to keep the government dole running. More importantly, and just as Bernanke is doing his best to stoke inflation, producer prices soared by 1.7% in August, up from July's 0.3%, and well above expectations of 1.2%. This was the biggest M/M spike since the 1.9% surge in June of 2009, and was driven primarily by soaring food prices, which however as everyone knows, is not really a factor in the Fed's thinking. "On an unadjusted basis, prices for finished goods climbed 2.0 percent for the 12 months ended August 2012, the largest advance since a 2.8-percent increase for the 12 months ended March 2012." Then again, who out there needs food or energy - inflation is precisely what Bernanke wants, the FOMC will welcome this news with open arms. But at least the Fed will create jobs and get people to give up on renting which is the New Normal buying, and scramble right back into the housing re-bubble.

The answer, of course, is yes: they are after all, economists (who somehow, with no real world experience, determine the daily fate of billions of productive and capital-allocation decisions every day). But it is one thing for everyone to discuss the obvious anecdotally by the water cooler. It is something else for this verbal heresy to be printed in a "serious" publication. Such as Reuters, which today asks if "the Federal Reserve has watched the U.S. recession and painfully slow recovery through rose-colored glasses?" And answers: "A look at the U.S. central bank's economic forecasts over the past five years suggest it has." It then explains: "Since October 2007, when the Fed's policy committee began giving quarterly predictions for GDP growth and the jobless rate, the central bank has downgraded its nearer-term forecasts almost two-and-a-half times as often as it upgraded them. The gap between Wall Street's expectations for 2012 growth and the Fed's own current view points to yet another downgrade on Thursday, when policymakers wrap up a two-day meeting that has world financial markets rapt." It concludes: "The trend of back-pedaling shows how poorly the central bank has fared at reading the economic tea leaves, with the Fed's optimism a likely factor in policy decisions through the Great Recession and its fallout, economists say." In summary: the world's most ebullient and permabullish forecasters, who incidentally happen to constantly be wrong in their desperate attempts to affect the only thing that matters: consumer and investor sentiment and confidence via the increasingly irrelevant myth that are asset prices, happen to run the monetary world and "determine" just what the future looks like. Needless to say, if the Fed's presidents were actually employed in the private sector, they would have been fired ages ago. Only in a fiat world do they not only keep their jobs, but keep on running the world.

Bill Gross may be credited with inventing the term 'the New Normal', although his recommendation to purchase gold above all other asset classes, something which only fringe blogs such as this one have been saying is the best trade (in terms of return, Sharpe Ratio, and the ability to sleep soundly) for the past three and a half years, he is sure to be increasingly ostracized by the establishment, and told to take all his newfangled idioms with him in his exile to less than serious people land. Which takes us to David Rosenberg, who today revisits his own definition of the New Normal. And it, too, is just as applicable as that of the Pimco boss: "The new normal is that the economy doesn't drive markets any more." Short and sweet, although it also is up for debate whether the economy ever drove the markets in the first place. But that would open up a whole new conspiratorial can of worms, and is a discussion best saved for after Ben Bernanke decides to save the "housing market" by buying more hundreds of billions in MBS and lowering mortgage yields further, even though mortgage rates already are at record lows (something that mortgage applications apparently couldn't care less about as we showed last week), while "avoiding" to do everything in his power to boost the S&P, which recently was at 5 year highs, and certainly "avoiding" to listen to Chuck Schumer telling him to do his CTRL+P job, and "get to work" guaranteeing Schumer's donors have another whopper of a bonus season.

Continuing with the theme of the secular shift in the labor pool (not cyclical, as the Fed still mistakenly believes: it will take it at least one more year to understand it has been wrong about this aspect of the New Normal economy too, just as it was wrong for decades about the Flow vs Stock debate), it is not only men who are fresh out of luck. As a reminder, we observed earlier that the labor force participation rate for men has just dropped to an all time low. It turns out there is another class of workers whose participation rate is at the lowest in series history: that of "25 year olds with a Bachelor's degree and higher", i.e. college grads. At 75.5%, it is the lowest since this data has been kept by the BLS. But not all is abysmal in America's labor force. While the share of workers with a college degree has plunged to all time lows, a bright spot can be found when observing the labor force participation rate of those who never bothered with college, and for whom high school was their last known degree-granting institution. At 59.9%, the participation rate is well of its 2012 lows of 59.0% and steadily rising, in fact, to borrow a term from the housing bulls, it may well have "bottomed". Now there is some truly great news for the future of America's highly educated workforce.

There was a time when the NSA would not know the content of this sentence minutes (or depending on the speed of typing, hours) ahead of our general readership. Those days are now gone, primarily thanks to the Patriot Act, which however merely accelerated the inevitable Orwellian destination to which American society was otherwise headed and which made constant "supervision" and "vigilance" of every US citizen a necessity (for some eyewatering details read “We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013). There was, however, one aspect of society over which the US government did not have Chinese-type "firewall" supreme authority: the Internet. Now, as a result of an Executive Order being quietly drafted, the president of this once great country, together with the Department of Homeland Security formed in response to the events of September 11, is about to grasp supreme control over this last bastion of New Normal expression and content dissemination, naturally under the guise of protecting the people. Because as Bloomberg reports, President Obama’s administration is drafting an executive order that would create a program protecting vital computer networks from cyber attacks.

A few months ago when the new French socialist president gave details of his particular version of the "fairness doctrine" and said he would tax millionaires at 75%, we said that "we are rotating our secular long thesis away from Belgian caterers and into tax offshoring advisors, now that nobody in the 1% will pay any taxes ever again." While there was an element of hyperbole in the above statement, the implication was clear: France's richest will actively seek tax havens which don't seek to extract three quarters of their earnings, in the process depriving France (and other countries who adopt comparable surtaxes on the rich) of critical tax revenues. It took three months for this to be confirmed, and with a bang at that. The WSJ reports that Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, and the richest man in France, has decided to forego hollow Buffetian rhetoric that paying extra tax is one's sworn duty, and has sought Belgian citizenship.

Curious why legendary hedge fund managers are shutting down shops left and right in disgust with the mockery that central planning and algorithmic short-termism had made of equity markets? Don't be: his name is Julian Marchese, he runs a "macro fund"... and he is 16. Don't get us wrong: we enjoy the next youth trading prodigy, and here the Schwab baby comes to mind, as much as everyone else. Our concern is when it is the people who have never even seen half of a business cycle that start running your money, and, probably worse, making money, which leads them to believe they know what they are doing, and gets gullible LPs to allocate capital to them based on a 3 month track record, when in reality the entire market is one merely primed for outperformance courtesy of central planner puts and priced to Bernie Madoff ponzi perfection, targeting a specific investor type. And here the Schwab baby comes to mind again.

Central Banks United have the upper hand these days. So don’t mess with them…

At least not this week…

Over the past several months (and years) we have been warning that the ongoing collapse in trading volumes, in part due to the lack of faith in capital markets that now have all the integrity of a rigged Vegas casino from the 1960s, in part due to investors' need to monetize assets in a world in which wages simply refuse to keep up with prices, will have not only irreversible implications on the shape of market structure, but also substantial consequences when it comes to the layout of modern banks, and associated up and downstream variables, such a jobs, real estate, support professions, municipal taxes and much more. Nowhere is this more evident (for now at least) than in the massive corporate reorganization taking place at Nomura's American division, which among many other things is about to lose its brand new $270 million trading floor even before a single trader set foot in it.

The dividend theme has hardly run its course. As David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff illustrates in his latest note, the income-starved retiring boomers are being forced to garner income more and more via the equity market where dividends are up more than 8% over the past year. Because of ultra-low interest rates, interest income growth has vanished completely. And here is the great anomaly. Back in the early 1980s, investors bought equities for capital appreciation and they purchased Treasury securities for yield. Today it is the complete opposite.

The chart below by way of Grant Thornton shows something rather disturbing: in recent months, the number of IPOs that are trading "at or above their issue price 30 days after IPO pricing" has been collapsing in virtually a straight line since the early 1990s, and in 2012 was just shy of all time lows (which have been recorded during periods of great market crashes, not when the S&P is about to hit its yearly highs). As such the lack of success of such prominent recent names as FaceBook, Zynga, Groupon and many others, is not simply a function of valuation and investor sentiment, but related to the ongoing deteriorating in the underlying market structure for a variety of reason, many of which have been written about here in the past.

There is one major problem, for the administration at least, when it comes to presenting labor data that is not "compiled" by the Bureau of beLabored Statistics and its Bank of Spain-endorsed Arima-X-13 seasonal data fudging program: it reflects realty, not statistical or seasonal adjustments, and certainly can not be skewed this way or that depending on what best suits the incumbent presidential candidate two months ahead of the election. Which is why one won't read anywhere that one of the most reliable indicators when it comes to real time hiring data as reported by the actual job market and not by some conflicted, data challenged organization which on top of everything has data leak issues, namely Help Wanted ads just plunged by the most since the Lehman collapse.

Having operatied for years under ZIRP, and with the NIRP neutron bomb just around the corner, and already implemented in various European countries, one question remains: can banks be banks, i.e., can they make money, in a world in which borrowing short and lending long, no longer works, courtesy of ubiquitous and pervasive central planning which is now engaged solely and almost exclusively (the other central bank ventures being of course to keep FX rates and equities within an acceptable range) on the shape of the yield curve. Since 2009 our answer has been a resounding no. Today, Bill Gross speaks up as well, and his answer is even more distrubing: "If the dancing has slowed down, then the reason is not just an overweight partner. It’s that the price of money (be it in the form of a real interest rate, a quality risk spread, or both) is too low. Our entire finance-based monetary system – led by banks but typified by insurance companies, investment management firms and hedge funds as well – is based on an acceptable level of carry and the expectation of earning it. When credit is priced such that carry is no longer as profitable at a customary amount of leverage/risk, then the system will stall, list, or perhaps even tip over." Indeed, according to Gross central banks have now clearly sown the seeds of the entire financial system's own destruction. That he is right we have no doubt. The only question: how soon until he is proven right.

While we have long realized that under the 'New Normal' reality is widely in the eye of the beholder, especially if that beholder is an employee of some central planning authority, where good is good, bad is better, where "if things are serious, than you have to lie", and the result is that every 'fact' is both a wave and a particle at the same time regardless if observed with the wave-particle duality never collapsing (thus making a mockery of Schordinger's principles) little did we know that it also refers to the physical age of former 'prenup free' wives of one time hedge fund moguls, and now merely drugged, drunk drivers of (appropriately enough) GPS-impaired vehicles, which it appears can have a variance of 7 years in the span of 2 years... Read on.

While the Clint Eastwood clip was a solid 8 out of 10 on the weirdness chart, it took the man who, as everyone knows, scares all charts away, and who singlehandedly burst the dot-com bubble, to put things in perspective to the evangelical crowd. Because, while Waldo may be hiding from Norris, Norris will no longer hide from what he terms "socialism or something much worse."