Nicolas Sarkozy

Are countries which want to trade in their own currencies or to own their own central banks getting spanked ?

Just like in the US, where we had our very own Treasury Secretary telling us there is "no risk" the US would get downgraded, about 3 months before America did in fact get downgraded, the cognitive dissonance between reality and fantasy is fully exposed today, this time in Europe. And whereas patriotic chauvinism has its good and bad sides, listening to politicians explain away how the impossible has just happened is always very amusing. Especially when translated by Google. Such as in this case, where we have grabbed the following article from Les Echos and dumped it into the modern version of the babel fish.

In plain terms, both the IMF and Germany have stated they will help Greece if and only if Greece agrees to various measures… which they KNOW Greece cannot agree to. And so the Greek issue has become a kind of “hot potato” that no one wants to keep holding. Meanwhile, every day that this issues doesn’t get solved, the EU as a whole moves closer to systemic failure.

All you need to read.

Even as we are drowned by yet another avalanche of lies and cow feces that the Greek private sector bailout negotiation is going well, despite everyone knowing very well by now that various hedge funds like Saba, York and CapeView are holding the entire process hostage and the culmination will be a CDS trigger, the underlying dynamics of the Greek "bailout" once again resurface, which are and always have been all about Germany and the tensions within its various political parties. And unfortunately at this point things are looking quite bad for Greece. As Bloomberg reports, "Greece will have to exit the euro area as it struggles under a mountain of debt, unable to regain its competitiveness without having its own currency to devalue, a senior lawmaker in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party said. The comments by Michael Fuchs, the deputy floor leader for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, contradict the chancellor’s stance in a sign of the domestic headwinds she faces in leading Europe’s efforts to keep the 17-member euro area intact. With the debt crisis into its third year, Merkel is due to join CDU lawmakers at a two-day policy meeting beginning tomorrow in the northern German city of Kiel." The truth hurts: "For Greece, “the problem is not whether they are capable of paying their loans -- they will not, not at all, never." So, why are we optimistic on Europe again? Oh yes, because European banks issued tons of equity and now have a capital buffer to the imminent hurricane that will be unleashed once the Greek restructuring finally enters freefall mode and the country leaves the Eurozone. No wait, that's not right: only UniCredit tried that and its stock collapsed by 50%. Must be something else then - oh yes, Italy successfully sold debt maturing in one year!

The run into Chinese Lunar New Year has again seen higher than expected Chinese demand for gold and China's voracious appetite for gold is surprising even analysts who are positive about gold. As Chinese people's disposable incomes gain and concerns grow over inflation and equity and property markets, Chinese consumers and investors are turning to gold as a long term investment hedge. There is informed speculation that commercial Chinese banks may have taken advantage of the recent price dip to build stocks of coins and bars and accumulate bullion. China's demand for physical gold bullion has rocketed past India with the country now overtaking India in the third quarter as the largest gold jewellery market according to the World Gold Council. There is also informed speculation that some of the buying was from the People's Bank of China with one analyst telling Bloomberg that “there is always the possibility that some purchases were made by the central bank.”

Payback sure is a bitch. After being demonized for everything from the tiniest tick down in the EURUSD, to blowing out spreads in CDS, to plunging stocks across the insolvent continent, hedge funds, long falsely prosecuted for everything, even stuff they patently did not do, are about to have their day in the sun, precisely in the manner we predicted back in June of last year when we posted: "Greek Bailout #2 Is Dead On Arrival: A Few Good Hedge Funds May Have Called The ECB's Bluff, And Hold The Future Of The EUR Hostage." Back then we wrote: "we may suddenly find ourselves in the biggest "activist" investor drama, in which voluntary restructuring "hold out" hedge funds will settle for Cheapest to Delivery or else demand a trillion pounds of flesh from the ECB in order to keep the eurozone afloat. In other words, the drama is about to get very, very real. And, most ironically, a tiny David is about to flip the scales on the mammoth Goliath of the ECB and hold the entire European experiment hostage..." Sure enough, we were right yet again. Ekathimerini writes: "Hedge funds are taking on the powerful International Monetary Fund over its plan to slash Greece's towering debt burden as time runs out on the talks that could sway the future of Europe's single currency. The funds have built up such a powerful positions in Greek bonds that they could derail Europe's tactic of getting banks and other bondholders to share the burden of reducing the country's debt on a voluntary basis." Oh no, they will let it happen, but first Europe will pay, with real interest, for every single incident of hedge fund bashing and abuse over the past 2 years. We estimate the final tally, to US taxpayer mind you, will be about $20 billion, to remove the "nuisance factor" of hold out hedge funds. Congratulations Europe - you have proven to be a continent full of idiot "leaders" once again.

• Italy Is Biggest Risk to Euro, Says Fitch (WSJ)
• Greek Bailout in Peril (WSJ)
• Swiss Currency Test Looms for SNB’s Jordan in Race to Replace Hildebrand (Bloomberg)
• Daley to Depart as Obama Shifts Strategy From Compromise to Confrontation (Bloomberg)
• BOE Stimulus Expansion May Not Be Enough to Revive U.K. Recovery, BCC Says (Bloomberg)
• Geithner in China to Discuss Yuan, Iran (Bloomberg)
• China Won’t See Hard Landing in 2012, Former PBOC Adviser Yu Yongding Says (Bloomberg)
• Measures to boost China financial markets (China Daily)
• Obama Panel to Watch Beijing (WSJ)

All you need to know.

As Greek standards of living nose-dive, loans to households and businesses shrink still further, and Troika-imposed PSI discussions continue, there is one segment of the country's infrastructure that is holding up well. In a story on Zeit Online, the details of the multi-billion Euro new arms contracts are exposed as the European reach-around would be complete with IMF (US) and Europe-provided Greek bailout cash doing a full-circle into American Apache helicopters, French frigates, and German U-Boats. As the unnamed source in the article notes: "If Greece gets paid in March the next tranche of funding (€ 80 billion is expected), there is a real opportunity to conclude new arms contracts." With the country's doctors only treating emergencies, bus drivers on strike, and a dire lack of school textbooks and the country teetering on the brink of Drachmatization, perhaps our previous concerns over military coups was not so far-fetched as after the Portuguese (another obviously stressed nation), the Greeks are the largest buyers of German war weapons.  It seems debt crisis talks perhaps had more quid pro quo than many expected as Euro Fighter commitments were also discussed and Greek foreign minister Droutsas points out:"Whether we like it or not, Greece is obliged to have a strong military".

All you need to know.

At all levels: preparations for the collapse of the Eurozone. Even the public is now encouraged to prepare for it.

On Friday, as the Eurobond market was briefly soaring, we attributed the move to sentiment that was best captured by a note out of Morgan Stanley's govvie desk: "The carry trade is happening, there is no doubt about it. In SPGBs (45bps tighter t0) we estimate 15-20bn (incl 6bn auction) of buying from domestic mid sized banks and cajas THIS WEEK (500mm is usual 2way trading volume per day). We are seeing the same starting with Italian mid tier banks in BTPs today (35bps tighter t0). Also Ireland seems to be very well bid up to 2016 maturities (75bps tighter on day). While Huw and Laurence anticipated this in their research piece on the LTRO from yesterday, we certainly did not expect it to be this intense and front loaded, this is the strongest buying we have seen all year, it feels a lot like QE." In simple summary, what MS was hoping and praying (because if clients are buying, MS is selling) its clients would believe, is that European banks would promptly forget that Europe has trillions of rolling over financial corporate debt, and instead of focusing on generating the cash needed to pay down maturities if no buyer stepped up, banks would somehow re-lever, by buying up even more sovereign debt in hopes of catching a few bps of carry, and completely ignoring the "#1 issue at the heart of the Eurozone crisis"^TM - the fundamental supply/demand paper maturity mismatch. Not to mention that any statement which needs the redundant "there is no doubt about it" is a 100% lie. It took the market about 3 hours to wake up from its zombified state and to do a 180, proceeding to rapidly sell off European debt following the realization that the Morgan Stanely thesis is nothing but a purely self-serving lie. The folks at Reuters IFR explain why MS completely botched this one up, and why Eurobanks are finally starting to wake up to the realization that the MF Global trade just may not be coming to town.

The market's reaction to Draghi's comments over the last week have been visceral in its schizophrenia. While his 'temporary' provisions, three-year LTROs specifically, provide a life-line of liquidity (a la TLGP - and how is that working out for the US banks having to roll now?), they hardly address the real underlying problem of the vicious circle between sovereign debt's now-risky nature and financial balance sheets bloated with zero-risk-weighted re-hypothecated peripheral bonds. The last week has seen a roller-coaster of Senior-Sub debt decompression and compression, liquidation-like drops in commodities, lower correlation across European sovereign debt, and significant dispersion in high- and low-beta equity and credit markets (notably as we have previously discussed, some of which will have been driven by index roll technicals). The issue comes down to whether this is the Bazooka (buy-buy-buy) or not enough (fade-the-rallies) and BARCAP's macro sales and European Banks' research team have, like the rest of the market, been exchanging views on this perspective. While their take on the liquidity explosion is that it doesn't solve the almost unsolvable solvency problem but it the deeper insight that perhaps it is not the actual mechanics of this liquidity bazooka but the perception that democracy itself has been suspended in favor of bank and sovereign survival that interests us more. Furthermore, they do an excellent job on breaking down the mythical carry trade potential of these LTROs and mutual sovereign financing benefits since near-term (carry-trade) profit potential would be offset by additional sovereign risk - meaning that funding markets could stay closed for longer. Once again the issue of collateralization, risk-weightings, and deleveraging are front-and-center as bank 'managers' and politicians may be at loggerheads on the carry-trade-savior potential and the ECB's status on the balance sheet only serves to further subordinate existing bondholders.

• Merkel Mired by Woes That May Deter Crisis Effort (Bloomberg)
• Trade wars accelerate: China set to tax US-made car imports (FT)
• Bernanke Tells Senators Federal Reserve Has No Plan to Aid European Banks (Bloomberg)
• Cameron rules out putting extra €30bn into IMF (FT)
• Inside Wukan: the Chinese village that fought back (Telegraph)
• Dems Moving From Insistence on Millionaire Tax (Bloomberg)
• Republicans face voting shake-up (FT)
• Nicolas Sarkozy: David Cameron's like a child (Metro)
• China FDI flows stumble in November as U.S. drags (Reuters)
• Putin Ally Resigns Russian Parliament Post (WSJ)