Salient

Dizzying spikes are part of the business.

"While there are many reasons to be bearish on stocks, there is only one good reason to be bullish. The only bullish hope is that the Bernanke Put again will save the stock market" is the salient reality that TrimTabs' CEO Charles Biderman exclaims in his latest clip. Shifting to 100% bearish this weekend for his institutional clients, he believes that even if the Fed QuEases again, the equity pop is well-discounted and will have at most a 10% impact before he sees at least a 20% drop from April highs followed by potentially worse as the realization of the fiscal cliff begins. The glass-half-full-of-truth Biderman notes four specific reasons for his bearish call: from wage and salary growth slowing to barely positive YoY, to the Fed's inability to create any multiplier effect to boost the economy; and from the slowing global economy where "low tides will uncover all the hidden garbage created by booms" to the basic supply/demand of stock and money based on his 'Demand' index dropping to six-month lows. His bearish view is not even predicated on Europe's conflagration accelerating which would simply add more fuel to the growing fire.

Falling interest rates are a feature of our current monetary regime, so central that any look at a graph of 10-year Treasury yields shows that it is a ratchet (and a racket, but that is a topic for another day!).  There are corrections, but over 31 years the rate of interest has been falling too steadily and for too long to be the product of random chance.  It is a salient, if not the central fact, of life in the irredeemable US dollar system. Irving Fisher, writing about falling prices (I shall address the connection between falling prices and falling interest rates in a forthcoming paper) proposed a paradox: “The more the debtors pay, the more they owe.” Debtors slowly pay down their debts and reduce the principle owed.  This would reduce the NPV of their debts in a normal environment.  But in a falling-interest-rate environment, the NPV of outstanding debt is rising due to the falling interest rate at a pace much faster than it is falling due to debtors’ payments.  The debtors are on a treadmill and they are going backwards at an accelerating rate. How apropos is Fisher’s eloquent sentence summarizing the problem!

"What happens when the Bernanke Put dies?" is the salient question that Charles Biderman of TrimTabs asks and answers in today's effusive excursion into a market that will face both deflation and inflation. In response to the question of what happens after the current miasma of markets ends, Biderman opines that assets will deflate - once the Bernank's constant handing over of trillions to bankers is done, equity and bond prices will deflate and commodity prices will inflate. Nominal USD-priced commodities will soar against a deflating currency as asset prices for everything else will deflate. Concerned, just as we have been, that outbreaks of violence will occur in Europe as their 'safety net' unravels, Charles adds that while the US faces turmoil, Europe will get their ahead of us as "their entire welfare-state-based economies will need a do-over". He does offer a silver-lining for the post-modern world with some thoughts on the productivity boom (and not just leverage) that an online world will bring and while he believes US housing has bottomed for the lowest 2/3rds of the population, he remains extremely cautious on equity prices and their inevitable crash.

Only a wilful and ideological Keynesian could ignore the salient detail: as soon as the USA left the gold exchange standard,  total factor productivity began to dramatically stagnate.   Coincidence? I don’t think so — a fundamental change in the nature of the money supply coincided almost exactly with a fundamental change to the shape of the nation’s economy. Is  the simultaneous outgrowth in income inequality a coincidence too? Keynesians may respond that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and though we do not know the exact causation, there are a couple of strong possibilities that may have strangled productivity. It’s not just total factor productivity that has been lower than in the years when America was on the gold exchange standard — as a Bank of England report recently found, GDP growth has averaged lower in the pure fiat money era (2.8% vs 1.8%), and financial crises have been more frequent in the non-gold-standard years.

Over-collateralization rates for Spanish covered bonds goes into the stratosphere -- 200-300% -- a grim indication of loss given default.

There's a big, fat "I told you so" coming down the pike. 

Has the case really gone cold? Or, are those who are in charge of the investigation, the "regulators" and the trustees, simply spraying teflon on every piece of sticky evidence that could lead to criminal prosecutions?

(Today, we have the date correct) DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach (whose AUM is now well into the $30 billion area - a scorching ascent for the former TCW manager) will host a live call at 4:15 PM Eastern today, on the ever so salient topic (if somewhat regurgitated soundbite) of whether "To QE3 or Not To QE3: That is the question." As is traditional, Gundlach will accept questions from the audience. And as always, lots of very interesting tangential info to be gleaned from one of the truly objective and original thinkers out there.

Correction: the Gundlach call is tomorrow. We got a little ahead of ourselves. We will bring this post back tomorrow after the close.

DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach (whose AUM is now well into the $30 billion area - a scorching ascent for the former TCW manager) will host a live call at 4:15 PM Eastern today, on the ever so salient topic (if somewhat regurgitated soundbite) of whether "To QE3 or Not To QE3: That is the question." As is traditional, Gundlach will accept questions from the audience. And as always, lots of very interesting tangential info to be gleaned from one of the truly objective and original thinkers out there.

We all know there is no shortcut to anything worth having--mastery, security, wealth-- yet all we have in America is another useless, doomed shortcut. Insolvency is scale-invariant, meaning that being unable to live within your means leads to insolvency for households, towns, corporations, states and national governments. There is no shortcut to living within one's means. Expenses must align with revenues or the debt taken on to fill the gap will eventually bankrupt the entity--even an Empire. We know this, but all we have in America is the shortcut of borrowing more to fill the gap between revenues and expenses. The Federal government is borrowing a staggering 40% of its budget this year--and it has done so for the past three years. Despite all the fantastic predictions of future solvency, the cold reality is that no plausible level of "growth" will close the gap: either expenses must be cut by $1.5 trillion or tax revenues raised by $1.5 trillion or some combination of those realities.

They've got to be kidding: abstinence hell is coming to Italy’s technocrat reformers and professional politicians, unless....

Sometimes, the biggest threat comes from within...

When reporting on yesterday's bizarre market action, which in addition to criss-crossing the DJIA 13,000K a total of almost 70 times in the past 4 days, saw some very curious fireworks throughout the day, we noted a very curious sell off in stocks in the last second of trading, which we jokingly (or so we thought) claimed was another flash crash. As it turns out, the move may indeed have been a mini flash crash, with all the salient features exhibited by the market on that fateful day in May 2010 when the DJIA plunged by 1000 points in seconds. Nanex, which unlike the SEC, is eager to explain and unearth strange and unexpected market moves, has performed a forensic analysis on this data, and has uncovered the same quote dissemination delay that occured during the Flash Crash, only this time not in the NYSE, but on the Nasdaq. Which, in turn should answer readers' questions whether any exchange is safe (if anyone were to care to find out the answer), aside from Sizma X of course.

When it comes to labor-wage parity, nowhere has this topic been more debated than in the context of China and the US. Specifically, with US wages declining consistently for the past 3 years despite commodity price inflation spiking with a 2-3 month lag following every coordinated central bank printing episode (such as the one we are experiencing now), many have proffered their predictions as to when Chinese secular inflation would make wage pay equivalent on both sides of the Pacific, and stop the exporting of jobs from the US to China (a good discussion on the topic can be found in "With China Forecast To Reach Wage Parity With The US In Five Years, Is A New Manufacturing Golden Age Coming To The US?"). And while labor equivalency between China and the US likely still has a ways to go, we have now crossed a critical Rubicon, as Chinese and European wages, at least in one part of European Union, have caught up. Net result, as Spiegel reports, carmaker "Great Wall this week became the first Chinese automobile manufacturer to open an automobile assembly plant inside the European Union in the latest move suggesting the country's carmakers are seeking to establish a beachhead into the European market." Yes, that's right: it is now cheaper for China to make cars in the European Union: "It used to be that European carmakers opened plants to assemble their cars in China. Now the Chinese have turned the tables with the opening of their first factory in Bulgaria, an EU country with low labor costs and taxes. Increasingly, Chinese carmakers are setting their sights on the European and American automobile markets." The ramifications of this landmark development are massive for virtually every aspect of the economy: for domestic labor migration, for inflation, for the trade balance, and certainly for US workers.