Nomura

The GDP numbers are coming in much weaker than expected and Q4 2010 is but another example. The case for stagflation is strong, even without oil prices going through the roof. Mainstream economists have no idea what's coming.

After protests recently shifted to Korea, they have now migrated to very tightly controlled Vietnam (and some were wondering what the reason for the orchestrated take down of rice in the past week was), in the first public demonstration by unhappy farmer against the controlling regime in many years. In the meantime, as the media blackout over developments in Korea, Bahrain and just as importantly Algeria continues (not to mention China), keeping in mind that as Nomura predicted, a shut down in Algerian and Libyan oil production is all that is needed for crude to hit $220, we now look forward to Venezuela to join the revolutionary ranks, with the culmination being when Afghanistan and Pakistan, and associated nukes, go in play.

Ahead of what is shaping up to be a brutal March for Europe, here is a refresh of all the key European data. Keep this handy as there will be much selling (and, respectively, much buying by the ECB) over the next month. From Nomura: "We refresh the Cheatsheet in the lead-up to a period of key events for euro sovereigns. On 25 February Ireland is set to hold elections, which could ultimately be positive for the sovereign in settling some of the political turmoil that is gripping the country in the post-bailout world. The upcoming ECOFIN (14/15 March) and EU Council (24/25 March) meetings are crucial for the future of the crisis resolution mechanism based on the proposed timeline of the EU treaty change."

Waiting for a Saudi revolution before buying those $200 oil calls? It may be time to reevaluate: according to Nomura a halt in just Libyan and Algerian oil production (far more likely than the crisis spilling over to Saudi) would send oil to over $220/bbl. Specifically "the closest comparison to the current MENA unrest is the 1990-91 Gulf War. If Libya and Algeria were to halt oil production together, prices could peak above US$220/bbl and OPEC spare capacity will be reduced to 2.1mmbbl/d, similar to levels seen during the Gulf war and when prices hit US$147/bbl in 2008." Wouldn't a doubling in price lead to a major demand plunge as well? Yes it would "This could also result in a temporary demand destruction of some 2.0mmbbl/d globally." Also, since the Fed's free money was not flooding global market last time, $220 is just a lowball estimate: "We could be underestimating this as speculative activities were largely not present in 1990-91."

The Numbers Behind the Middle Eastern and North African Revolts

China continues to joust with windmills as its latest attempt to counter inflation, a 50 bps RRR hike, is now history, and will be just as successful as all of its previous RRR, and interest rate hikes at rebuffing gentle Ben's attempt at genociding a few hundred million additional serfs. Luckily for now the "silver for rice" trade continues, keeping a lid on rice prices. Indicatively, as we showed previously, neither interest rate hikes nor RRR have any impact on the Chinese market whatsoever, confirming that the only source of global liquidity that matters resides in the Marriner Eccles building.

There is a real sense of the “calm before the storm” in markets globally. Complacency reigns, despite signs that the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is deepening and that Japanese and US bond markets also look very vulnerable due to rising inflation, very large deficits and massive public debt. US Treasuries have been sold by some of the largest investors (both private and sovereign) in the world recently (see news). These include large creditor nations Russia and China but also PIMCO, the largest bond fund in the world. A global sovereign debt crisis is now quite possible. At the very least, we are likely to have a long period of rising interest rates which will depress economic growth. Contrary to some misguided commentary, rising interest rates will benefit gold as was seen when interest rates rose sharply in the 1970s. It was only towards the end of the interest rate tightening cycle in 1980, when interest rates were higher than inflation, that gold prices began to fall.

Regulatory Capture now appears to be accepted policy procedure as FASB bends over and gives up on even asking financial entities to report accurate market values, leaving only those who spend their lives in spreadsheets and arcane nomenclature capable of discerning trash from treasure. I guess it best that way. The truth has this proclivity to hurt people's feelings, not to mention certain ill gotten gains...

Those poor idiotic rating agencies can never catch a break. Despite doing their fair share of hiring as many prosimians with a single digit IQ (not to mention a penchant for spreading inside information to preferred clients, see Deep Shah) as they can, thereby keeping the labor pool sufficiently susceptible to BLS manipulation, it was they that, according to Koo, destroyed the global economy the first time around, after keeping every toxic CDO at a AAA rating. Now, the Nomura economist, whose obstinacy in his views at times makes even such distinguished voodoonomic shamans as Paul Krugman seem like docile little lambs, is convinced that "these same agencies are once again attempting to interfere with governments that are trying to do the right thing in response to the economic crisis (ie, the balance sheet recession) triggered in part by these agencies’ actions. In spite of the fact that fiscal stimulus is the only effective measure during such a recession, the rating agencies are making it more difficult for governments to spend money by implicitly threatening downgrades." Yeah ok, the right thing is to fight debt with more debt. And more debt with morer debt. And so on. We wonder if that is the case, why doesn't Dictator Bernank just tell his Jeethner lackey to print $100 trillion tomorrow? After all that is the NEF's target for debt in 2020. That way we should grow world GDP by about 100% overnight, and save ourselves ten years of deleveraging misery. But stop there? Why not print $1 quadrillion, $1 quintillion, $1 decillion... After all debt is wealth remember? Because try as hard as we can, we just can't spot any faults with this argument which derives straight from Mister Koo's supposedly irrefutable logic.

I am not an economist, but as a strategist I believe there is a case for a multi-year period of weak growth in the US, which could be magnified by an EM slowdown as the EM bloc diverges policy to deal with its own domestic positive output gaps, domestic inflation problems and domestic asset bubbles. The obvious problem is that the US has an excess debt problem and a central bank that seeks to solve asset bubbles that burst by creating new asset bubbles. This policy has been proved a failure. Remember that debt does not equal wealth, that asset bubbles do not equal wealth, that more liquidity does not equal money but instead equals more debt, and that liquidity does not equal capital.

The key driver for the markets continues to be the dollar, which is making more sense now as it saved the Dow and the S&P last week (50% of revenues come from overseas) but not the Russell (10% of revs from overseas) or the Nasdaq (30%).

Bob Janjuah was interviewed by Bloomberg TV's Erik Schatzker earlier in which the famous former RBS and now Nomura contrarian who predicted the 2008 crash shares his "skeptically strategic" and tactical outlook on the market: in a nutshell he joins technicians such as Tom DeMark in calling for a 10% correction in the market. Among the three key themes underlying his skeptical views are the following: i) Asia slow down (hard or soft) which will have implications on US markets; ii) Is Europe closer to the endgame; and iii) the US recovery, and the question of how sustainable it is especially following the elimination of the ES boost courtesy of now-daily POMO operations. In terms of asset allocations, Janjuah believes that a reallocation out of EM and into DM makes sense (time for reverse reverse decoupling already?). And just to clarify what Bob's personal position is, for those who may have missed his last two years of letters and memos, he says "I think we are going to have a deeper and harder slowdown in Asia, I think the European situation is closer to the endgame, my biggest doubt is on the US recovery...I think in Q2 and Q3 the grow slowly weakens, and much like last year we are going to be looking for QE3, and my concern is that the hurdle rate for further policy, fiscal and monetary, is much much higher." But most importantly, as Schtazker points out: "Effectively the Fed was the bid. If the Fed's hadn't been in the market, flooding investors with liquidity giving them cash to buy risk assets, the S&P would have declined." Finally people get how central planning works...

Lately the biggest action in stocks is coming not out of the US, where the 4 month old melt up is on its last fumes, but out of China, where the marginal liquidity has now dried up, leading to such explosions of concern as 7 day SHIBOR going asymptotic (a topic discussed earlier). Some readers have expressed a concern as to just how credible RRR and interest rate hike actions are as relating to the performance of the Chinese stock market. Well, a look at the recent action in the SHCOMP for one should serve as a good basis for a starting opinion. A far better one, and stretching back a decade, was recently conducted by Nomura, which presents the following must see chart which shows how toothless the PBoC is when it has to deal with already latent massive liquidity excess. Specifically, during the 2006-2007 bull market, the PBOC had to hike interest rates 7 times in a row, and increase the RRR over 10 times before the market topped out in late 2007. Which begs the question: just how impotent is the PBoC in sequestering excess liquidity (remember: Bernanke can do it in 15 minutes), and are its tangential actions of boosting liquidity far more relevant when it comes to the MSCI China Index? Last but not least, the PBoC can merely control domestic liquidity directly: it is well known that foreign inflows into China refuse to abate. It is precisely this that the Chinese central bank should be (and probably is) dead set on intercepting if it wants to prevent food price riots (recall our prediction for a rice bubble).

The reason for today's most recent bizarro boil up per Bloomberg: "The European Central Bank spent between 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) and 1.5 billion euros in government bonds in the last two days, according to Nomura International Plc estimates." No news yet on how much Japan, China, the Smurfs, and Uranus ended up having to purchase to bring you today's 1% surge in stocks.

Despite our relatively light coverage on the subject recently, we haven't forgotten that the US stock marketplace is broken beyond what some say, any chance of fixing. Unfortunately, it has become painfully obvious that between the corrupt SEC and CFTC, there will be no proactive regulation, no actual changes to a broken market structure, until the next, and far more serious flash crash takes place, and destroys the last trace of market credibility. In the meantime, looking back at 2010 market developments, aside form the one event that punctuated just how broken the market is, namely the May 6th flash crash, there were other notable events. Below we present Themis Trading's five best market structure themes of 2010.