RBS

A few months ago we drew the ire of RBS for suggesting that Greek savers are pulling their deposits out of Greek banks and expatriating assets, in other, less polite words, consummating a bank run. Today we risk that anger again, by taking the very same logic we used logic to the next degree, namely that there could well be a capital flight out of the entire continent of Europe. Some pundits have already suggested this, by looking at March and April TIC data, which however is sufficiently delayed to be irrelevant as the real European festivities only started in May. A far better proxy is the surge in Swiss FX reserves, which took these from 28% to 43% of GDP in one month! Obviously, this was due to intervention actions meant to moderate the rate of increase in the CHF, due to conversion of Euros into Francs as foreigners were depositing tens of billions into the country's banking system. With the EURCHF now back to 1.3743, or a level below all previous interventions, either the SNB has thrown in the towel or, as we wrote yesterday, another round of EUR buying is due any minute. In either case, the underlying problem continues - the broader public is buying CHF and selling EUR in droves, threatening to push the EURCHF to fresh all time lows, certainly signifying a capital flow out of the so-called European core, and into the little country by the alps with lots of cheese, chocolates and bank vaults. Below are Goldman's relatively more moderately noted, but just as troubling, thoughts on the matter.

The world's undisputed monetization grossmaster (Electronic Liability Outsourcing rating of around 1.8 trillion), representing Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, may be about to see some stiff championship title competition from the little Central Bank that could - the ECB, in a blitz (and very much blind) game of quantitative easing. In a speech, that not too surprisingly missed all the main wires earlier, Fitch head of sovereign ratings, Brian Coulton, warned a banking conference, in discussing the ECB's monetization activity to-date, that "there has been an unwillingness to follow through, and markets are going to want to see the ECB's money. It will require hundreds of billions in my opinion." Which means that Bob Pisani will report on many "extremely successful" Spanish bond auctions over the next year or so, as the ECB buys up every single primary issuance not just out of Madrid, but every single country in Europe, where the non-subsidized (i.e. private) capital markets are now officially dead. Courtesy of Greece, and the fatal decision to bail it out, the Eurozone will one day be described in textbooks as the greatest ponzi scheme ever created (or, at worst, joint in first place by the Fed).

As previously reported, BP has already hired Goldman, Blackstone and Credit Suisse. Now Charlie Gasparino reports that the British firm is apparently in the process of hiring every single investment bank in existence: new banks rumored to be in contract negotiations include Morgan Stanley, HSBC, UBS and Standard Chartered. According to Charlie "they are being asked to somehow guarantee that they would lend money to the company." Another angle is that the firm is preempting any possible hostile takeover, by preventing any competitor firm from hiring any of these banks, which pretty much round out all the megabank firms that have a credible capital markets desk (sorry RBS), and thus make a hostile acquisition problematic. At least so far there has been no taxpayer capital going to BP, so retainer and success fees for the 7 banks, which will likely run into the hundreds of millions, will only be footed by BP's ever angrier shareholders.

Tomorrow Spain is coming to market with €3.5 billion in 10 and 30 Year Bonds, which just like all previous recent auctions, are expected to come in at far wider spreads to prior issuance in May and March. The 10 Year benchmark will come with a 4% coupon, while the 30 Year will have a 4.7% clip. Which is not to say these will come at par. At the last 10 Year issuance on May 20, the 10 Year came in at 4.045%, while the 30 Year priced to yield 4.758% on March 28. Reuters reports that some so-called analysts see demand for the bonds to be strong: "Domestic has supported until now and I don't see why that would change," said sovereign debt analyst at RBS Harvinder Sian. Of course, this is the same Harvinder, who blasted Zero Hedge for correctly predicting the bank run in Greece in February, long before anyone else, at a time when investors could have listened to us, instead of Sian's soothing words, have a great exit point and not lose their shirts, unlike those who are still holding bonds at a 600 spread. In other words, in our book Harvinder is as good a contrarian indicator as Goldman's FX team, and is simply confirmation that in addition to Greek exposure, RBS is likely loaded to its nationalized gills with soon to be even worthlesser Spanish Treasuries. Our advice: fade the auction, especially with refuted, and thus confirmed, rumors that Spain is not, repeat not, about to demand €250 billion in European/IMF rescue funds. And, as if anyone needed another indication, the ticker of Banco Santander is STD... That about says it all.

Following up on the earlier report from El Economista that Spain is about to resort to another €50 billion in US taxpayer generosity and use €250 billion from the EU/IMF rescue fund, is this piece in the FT which confirms our disclosure from yesterday that Spanish banks have borrowed a record €85.6 billion from the ECB in May. And this is even before all the Cajas were scrambling to merge into Europe's biggest insolvent megabank. From the FT: "Spanish banks borrowed €85.6bn ($105.7bn) from the ECB last month. This
was double the amount lent to them before the collapse of Lehman
Brothers in September 2008 and 16.5 per cent of net eurozone loans
offered by the central bank. This is the highest amount since the launch of the eurozone in 1999
and a disproportionately  large share of the emergency funds provided by
the euro’s monetary guardian, according to analysis by Royal Bank of  Scotland and Evolution. Spanish banks account for 11 per cent of the
eurozone banking system. The rise in borrowing from €74.6bn in
April, or 14.4 per cent of the net liquidity pumped by the ECB into the
eurozone financial system, provides further evidence of the acute
tensions in the Spanish banking system." And here is the piece de resistance: "'If the suspicion that funding markets are being closed down to Spanish banks and corporations is correct, then you can reasonably expect the share of ECB liquidity accounted for by the country to have risen further this month,' said Nick Matthews, European economist at RBS." You can also expect the army of bureaucrats to deny, deny, deny until the US taxpayer has to fund another trillion dollar bailout. And speaking of spin, here is Goldman's take on all things Spanish.

Analysis of the CMBS market with a few notes on CC and ABS market.

JPM JPMCC 2010-C1 CMBS offering more sound than originally thought.

Something interesting just happened.

First Goldman came out with a "favorite tactical short" of the EURUSD, targeting a 1.18 rate several days ago, now BofA is out with the latest hit job on the European currency: the bailed out bank's John Shin has said that he is lowering his "forecast for the euro, pushing down the year-end 2010 target to 1.15 from 1.28 and the year-end 2011 target to 1.10 from 1.20." He continues, "the evolution of the crisis has not only been a near-term negative for the euro, but signals poorly for its medium and longer-term future." Now this is very ironic, because as we pointed out two short days ago, the very same firm's European strategist, Hans Mikkelsen, espoused a much different optimistic point of view: "While we continue to view funding pressures as contained due to the
ECB/Fed currency swap lines, the main risk to our tactical long credit
positions remains any disorderly declines in the Euro as that would
undermine the credibility of the ECB to contain the sovereign crisis." Presumably the take home here is that as long as the decline from 1.20 to 1.10 is orderly all shall be well? Because as has been repeatedly demonstrated, hedge funds always align calmly, in single file,  when the Central Bank theater is burning, happy to see their sell EUR orders executed if and only if RBS, BofA, Barclays and GS so desire... We eagerly await Mikkelsen's positive spin to Shin's note, as otherwise those defending Europe's less than rosy liquidity situation may be down one more advocate.

If you are like us, you just can't get enough of Bob. The only economist from RBS whose opinions are worth reading, who will never make any financial pundit lists (especially not ones that have Jim Cramer on them), due to his unpleasant habit of being too "truthy", shares 17 minutes of his latest perspectives in this CNBC Europe interview. Not surprisingly, Bob blasts the lunatic response of resolving debt problems with more debt. This time he also shares some additional political perspectives: “Having elected people who said everything would be all right, ultimately the US and UK had to elect Reagan and Thatcher to get us back on track” and eventually angry voters in the developed world will shift to the far right. Some more US-centric perspectives: “The US mid-terms will be crucial. We will see a shift to the right as the Tea Party movement demands change. "There are 220 million people in middle America who are angry and believe stimulus spending has been wasted on vested interest and the banks that they believe got us into this mess. For all the talk of positive growth in America, those outside of LA and New York are hurting and want cuts in government spending, not more borrowing and spending.”

As liquidity conditions in Europe continue being tight to say the least, an interesting arbitrage has emerged in the market for wholesale Euro deposit term markets, i.e., EUR Libor and Euribor. Even as EUR 3M Libor has stabilized recently, the same cannot be said for its European Banking Federation cousin, Euribor. While the two metrics should ideally converge, the dispersion between the two is now back to all time record levels, with EUR Libor at 90% the rate of Euribor. One might be tempted to say that due to the Euribor panel consisting of almost 3 times as many banks (42) as that of the BBA's Libor, and also due to a far less aggressive outlier trim (BBA removes top and bottom quartile, EBF cuts out the top and bottom 15%), Euribor is far better indicator of cash stress. To be sure, there are marginal structural differences between Libor and EURIBOR: the first is a submission of perceived cash offers in the interbank markets present to a BBA member bank by other parties, and thus tends to always be rosier, as no bank is willing to indicate that others potentially see it as a counterparty risk, demanding a higher funding rate. Euribor, on the other hand, indicates where the bank itself will offer cash, and thus provides far less fudging opportunities. Nonetheless, traditionally these two metrics have traded on top of each other, and diverge any time there is a liquidity crunch. Curiously, the current dispersion level is far wider than any seen during all of 2009, and only got to its current record level in the aftermath of the Greek rescue. As such, the liquidity imbalance of 10% could provide an unleveraged arbitrage to investors who wish to collapse the spread.

When all of Europe rushed into its rescue package two weeks ago (first half a trillion, market red, then a full trillion, market green), the one thing that struck us as odd was the conflicting data on the conditionality of the package, with various sources both confirming and denying that the "package" was revocable. It did seem somewhat shortsighted of the Germans, whose political leadership would soon be on the verge of a series of electoral routs, to tie its fate without even one exit hatch, to a country that is a financial toxic spiral. Sure enough, the Telegraph's Evans-Pritchard has uncovered what may be the two loopholes in the European bailout agreement. While the first one is not surprising, the second one explains why the biggest sellers of European government debt (and/or buyers of Euro sovereign CDS), are likely the governments of the distressed, and core, countries themselves.

Libor keeps rising as the short-term funding situation in Europe gets worse by the day: today USD Libor hit 0.50969%, a change of 0.01281% from Friday, the first time this metric has pushed over 0.5% in about nine months. The Libor reporting dispersion among BBA member banks has actually tightened marginally from last week, with one notable outlier: UBS. Of the 15 banks that report both USD and EUR-based LIBOR, all disclose a higher offer rate for EUR Libor except for UBS! The Swiss bank is a blatant outlier, in that its disclosed EUR Libor rate of 0.4850% is in fact 10% lower than its USD Libor. Just how big are the dollar funding needs of UBS, which many see as an "open market operations" vehicle for the SNB, a bank which it is no secret is now openly intervening in FX markets, and thus likely has provided a lifeline to UBS to provide this lower EUR Libor rate compared to US Libor. So how would the circle jerk go: SNB buys EUR in the open market (causing massive destruction in the EURCHF and GBPCHF pairs), then the excess euro holdings are funneled back into the market via a much cheaper EUR lending rate in the 3M funding market (LIBOR) compared to all other banks: the UBS 3M EUR Libor rate is a whopping 30% below the average EUR Libor rate of 0.6344%, nearly double the spread from average of the next lowest EUR Libor offer, that of RBS at 0.56%.

• Asian shares were down Friday, but many markets were off their lows by closing.
• China’s stocks fell to its worst week in 15 months, on the nation’s policy tightening.
• Crude oil is poised for a third weekly decline on European debt crisis
• FDIC said US banking industry continued to face challenges in Q1 2010.
• Germany's gross domestic product rose 0.2% in the first quarter of the year.
• Japan's central bank keeps rates steady and upgrades its economic outlook.
• US Senate approves Wall Street Financial Overhaul Bill after 59-39 vote.

Unconfirmed: RBS back up now. No idea what caused the black out, but likely a liquidity run.