Open Market Operations

The dominoes are starting to fall ...

Forget what the Fed is saying ... what is it actually doing?

In fact, just yesterday we had a TERRIBLE 30-year note auction on just $16Bn worth of notes. Already Ben is pretty much the only buyer of Tim’s trash paper and, as that bid to cover ratio drops below 2:1, you’ll see rates begin to tick up dramatically, despite the Fed’s best efforts to contain them and that will put pressure on houses, corporate debt, government debt, municipal debt etc and suddenly we’re Greece.

Various rumblings started at Zero Hedge and a few other fringe sites, and now essentially mainstream (not to mention emanating from such firms as, oops,  Goldman Sachs) as pertains to a rather curious correlation between POMO days and market outperformance, appear to have finally gotten to such institutional stalwarts as Bank of America and its traditionally imperturbable Jeff Rosenberg (whose opinion we tend to respect). In a piece released tonight titled appropriately enough, "The POMO Conspiracy Theory", Rosenberg (not to be confused with former M-Lyncher David) sets off to debunk that POMO days have an impact on risk assets. Alas, he fails. The conclusion: "Our analysis points to the correlation, but not causality of POMO with rising stock prices." Sure enough, if one could confirm definitive "causality" of Fed intervention in the stocks markets, that would pretty much be the ballgame right there. And it appears that even his correlation results force Rosenberg to step back: "We likely are about to get a lot more days of POMO if the market’s expectations of $500bn further expansion of  the Fed’s balance sheet is confirmed at the conclusion of Wednesday’s FOMC meeting. If the correlation of POMO purchases and stock prices were to continue to hold going forward as it has since August, than we should expect more frequent days where stocks go up as the Fed pumps in liquidity into the financial markets." Thank you for proving our point Jeffrey. Amusingly, at the end of his "debunking", Rosenberg, in typical banker fashion inverts the argument by 180 degrees, and says essentially that even if POMO is goosing markets, it basically creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that "can contribute to a better economic outcome" as it boosts inflation expectations. Jeffrey: a better outcome yes, but for you. And nobody else.

Someone has to lose but, in this case, the loser is the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America – which plays the part of the perennial sucker as they are willing to sit down at the table and be taken for all they have two or three days a week. And why are they willing to be so generous? BECAUSE IT’S NOT THEIR MONEY!

Junk economics and the Taylor Rule guide the Fed's QE2 monetary policy. Junk or not, the important thing is that they believe it. So does Goldman Sachs. How many dollars will the Fed print? $1Trn, $2Trn, $4Trn? You should know that they are all just guessing and have no idea how this will come out. Remember this word: stagflation.

Now is the time to own gold stocks. Most gold companies will report their Q3 earnings at the end of October. Due to a higher year-over-year average spot gold price (which has increased 27.8% to $1,228/oz in Q3 2010 vs. $961/oz in Q3 2009), virtually every precious metal company is forecast to exhibit substantial net income growth. These fantastic net income results will be augmented by higher by-product prices (average silver, copper, and zinc prices were up 28.7%, 24.2%, and 14.8% year-over-year), which should set the stage for banner year-over-year earnings increases. One of the best axioms for investing is painfully obvious, but so often forgotten by seasoned investors: it’s all about earnings. Earnings are what drive stock prices over the long term. Investors seek out earnings growth wherever they can find it, and we can’t think of a single equity sector that exhibits better year-over-year earnings growth potential than the gold producers. We expect that to change over the next two quarters as investors realize how much stronger gold producers’ earnings will be at $1,350 gold. As countries decide to burn their currencies in the devaluation race, gold has responded, and now it’s the producers turn to perform. We’ll gladly take the earnings. - Eric Sprott

Two simple charts tell it all. Bonus: at the end, we explain how to make Paul Krugman squirm.

After a few months of breaking down what the simplest trade in the world is, that would be frontrunning the Fed for the cheap seats, Zero Hedge is happy to advise our readers that finally Goldman Sachs itself has capitulated and is now indirectly telling its clients to frontrun Ben Bernanke via POMO. No complicated value investor nonsense, no pair trades, no cap structure arbitrage, no hedging, no levered beta plays. Buy ahead of POMO. Sell. Rinse. Repeat.

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Lately, it appears, it has gotten trendy to bash the New York Fed's Permanent Open Market Operations (POMO), especially by various self-appointed godfathers of the blogosphere. The logic goes, or so we interpret the thinking, that any given POMO is nothing but yet another component of the various signals that enter into the "perfectly efficient market" and the Fed's intervention is something that is perfectly acceptable, should be a tradeable event, and is nothing of real significance (and, of course, the original narrative would come wrapped in 10 paragraphs or so of fluff). Whatever. Below, in collaboration with John Lohman, we show what the market would look like without POMO, versus a market that is predicated exclusively on FRBNY interventions. The bottom line: starting with the first POMO in 2005, when the S&P was at 1,200 and continuing through today, the broader market index would have been at just over 800 if performance from POMO days was excluded. Alternatively, purely POMO days would have had the effect of doubling the stock market in the past 5 years. We hope readers can decide on their own whether Fed intervention in this case implies causation.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve called for a reversal in stocks. It seems I’ve completely underestimated the ability of the Federal Reserve and its Primary Dealers to ramp the market higher on next to no volume.

Indeed, stocks have soared in the last six weeks, posting their best September performance in 71 years and rising roughly 12% from trough to peak. This surpasses even July’s monster rally of 11.1% from trough to peak, stands as the most aggressive rally since the April 2010 top.

A couple trillion here, a couple trillion there adds up to real money ...

For the little guy or the economy as a whole, that is ... But it's GREAT for the people who really matter

Mark Pittman's last valiant effort to bring some transparency to the most destructive organization in the history of mankind has succeeded. According to testimony to be delivered to the House tomorrow, "under a framework established by
the act, the Federal Reserve will, by December 1, provide detailed
information regarding individual transactions conducted across a range
of credit and liquidity programs over the period from December 1, 2007,
to July 20, 2010. This information will include the names of
counterparties, the date and dollar value of individual transactions,
the terms of repayment, and other relevant information. On an ongoing
basis, subject to lags specified by the Congress to protect the efficacy
of the programs, the Federal Reserve also will routinely provide
information regarding the identities of counterparties, amounts financed
or purchased and collateral pledged for transactions under the discount
window, open market operations, and emergency lending facilities." Luckily this action by Bernanke will prevent the rioting that would have followed an appeal to the Supreme court, which would have certainly sided with the secretive group of Keynesian priests. If nothing else, the plethora of data will keep the blogosphere preoccupied for days upon days, rummaging through millions of pages of explicit corruption.