Sovereign Debt

The decision to downgrade Italy's rating reflects the following key factors:

1. Italy is more likely to experience a further sharp increase in its funding costs or the loss of market access than at the time of our rating action five months ago due to increasingly fragile market confidence, contagion risk emanating from Greece and Spain and signs of an eroding non-domestic investor base. The risk of a Greek exit from the euro has risen, the Spanish banking system will experience greater credit losses than anticipated, and Spain's own funding challenges are greater than previously recognized.

2. Italy's near-term economic outlook has deteriorated, as manifest in both weaker growth and higher unemployment, which creates risk of failure to meet fiscal consolidation targets. Failure to meet fiscal targets in turn could weaken market confidence further, raising the risk of a sudden stop in market funding.

It seems every week there are new acronyms or catchy-phrases for Europe's Rescue and Fiscal Progress decisions. Goldman Sachs provides a quick primer on everything from ELA to EFSM and from Two-Pack (not Tupac) to the Four Presidents' Report.

Oppurtunities such as this don't come up very often. My job is to cause reality to meet share prices. It's time to get to work, pardon me...

SSDD. Europe has a late night conference, regurgitates stuff, gives no details, makes lots of promises, peripheral bonds tighten only to blow out, etc, etc, etc. Seen it all before. Unlike a week ago, Spanish bonds, when Spanish bonds ripped by 1%, this time we can barely muster a 25 bps move tighter, with the 10 year "down" to  6.82%. It was 6.25% a week ago. Expect the blow out as has been empirically proven time and again. Hint: there is no magic money tree nor is there a magic collateral tree.

The Great Recession and the poor job market has stressed the middle class to its limit.   However, the seeds have long been sown from the poor fiscal and monetary policy implementation.

Steve Forbes has a message for a nation dominated by increasingly short-term decisions made on Wall Street and in Washington D.C., and by ever greater economic, financial and currency instability.  As long as America continues moving away from sound money; away from sound financial and economic policies; and, ultimately, away from freedom, its future grows more dim.  The dot-com and housing bubbles followed by the 2008 financial crisis and the most severe economic decline since the Great Depression serve as powerful lessons.  A future of bigger government, higher taxes, more burdensome regulations, less consumer choice and more unrealistic government promises requires more and more Federal Reserve play money. Steve Forbes has a quintessentially American policy prescription rooted in American history.  The answer to America’s economic problems is—and has always been—new wealth creation.  New wealth creation doesn’t come from the government or from the Federal Reserve’s printing press.  New wealth creation is what happens naturally with stable money based on the gold standard, lower taxes on individuals, a simplified tax code, reduced bureaucracy and free markets.

If you are reading this, you are probably a member of what the sociologists would term middle class (albeit at the upper end). This is precisely the segment of society which is poised to come off worst from what is coming. Here is a very disturbing idea. As this crisis develops, if you are an equity portfolio manager and you want to outperform the market, you are going to have to position your portfolio so that it benefits most from your own wealth destruction and that  of your family, friends and colleagues. Almost everybody is going to lose and there aren’t many places to hide. This is deeply unpleasant but you can blame the central planners. I’ve written about my own investing, e.g. gold and silver, equities in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, etc. In this Thunder Road Report (below) and going forward, I will discuss this middle class theme and highlight positions I have in individual stocks, etc. The only good thing that can  come out of this is a rise in awareness. It’s just awful.

Print, print, print as they may, central bankers will make no leeway until the true problem falls sway... ©2009-2012 the Lyrical Reggie Reg...

Germany will leave the Euro the moment that the EU Crisis spreads to France.  At that point any discussion of EU bailouts is pointless, as the very countries needing aid (France, Italy, Spain, and Greece) account for 53% of the ESM’s funding. 

Despite economic miss after miss, the momentum players in the market continue unfazed, dodectupling down on Bernanke Put Double Zero, pushing stocks to new highs simply on continued hopes that something in Europe may have changed with Merkel's so-called defeat last week, even as Merkel's key CSU coalition partners voiced an open threat earlier today to no longer support Eurozone aid if there is no conditionality - supposedly Mario Monti's biggest victory (ignoring that the German constitutional court is also faced with a barrage of demands to undo the ESM), and on hopes that tomorrow the ECB will announce something more drastic than the now widely expected 25 basis point cut. In other words a hope rally, even as bonds, and FX have now diverged dramatically with the hope gripping the global stock market. And hope is good, however if it becomes an investing "strategy" total loss is virtually guaranteed. That said, perhaps for the first time ever, bonds are wrong, and stocks are right, and all the bad news has been priced in (unlike all those other times when everyone said the same, and when everyone was certain they would sell first ahead of the herd). Which brings us to the question that Citi's Steven Englander has just asked himself: "So what can go wrong?" Here is his answer (in five parts).

Objective analysis, or media spin to gauge popular reaction to Plan Z? Whatever it is, today's staff lead article in the English section of Spiegel has a piece that will likely raise more than a few eyebrows: "The common currency union was supposed to benefit the economy of the entire European Union. Now that the euro is struggling, however, it is bringing growth down with it. Germany's economy, once seemingly immune to the crisis, is now facing mounting difficulties."

While conflicts within and with the Middle East region are still among the top global risks, the paradigm has definitively shifted to China and Europe.

The sea of red just got even redder as Japan, Korea, Norway, South Africa and Taiwan all dropped below 50, i.e., into contraction territory. From Bank of America: "Overnight and early this morning, a bevy of global manufacturing PMI reports were released. This provides us with an early reading on the state of manufacturing. Out of the 24 countries reporting so far, 10 saw month-over-month improvements in their manufacturing PMIs, while fourteen countries saw their PMIs worsen in June. Seventeen of the manufacturing PMIs were below the 50 breakeven level that divides expansion (+50) from contraction (+50). A majority of the below-50 PMI indices are located in the Euro area. The ongoing  sovereign debt and banking crisis continues to weigh on the region’s economic activity and sentiment. The Euro area slowdown is beginning to impact the rest of the world."

In a development that is too hilarious for even the most hardened cynics to pass by, starting today, the rotating presidency of the EU will be handed over to... broke Cyprus. We learn this and much more about the onslaught of sovereign debt auctions out of Spain and France in the month of July (explaining the urgency to come up with any mechanism to keep Spanish and Italian bond yields below 7% as absent some deux ex, no matter how temporary, the whole charade may have ended as soon as 31 days from today) courtesy of the following calendar of key events out of Europe.

Even as Spain, Italy and soon France are scrambling to break the link between sovereigns and banks, an unpopular move that until recently Germany was very much against as it permitted the culture of endless unsupervised bank bailouts on taxpayer dimes to continue, we get a fresh reminder of why any unconditional aid, entitlement, or backstop guarantees funded by "other people's money" is always inevitably a bad idea. Case in point: Spain, which just said that its economy will contract in Q2 even more than in Q1. This reminds us why any claims of "austerity" are a total mockery: only Keynesian priests seem unable to grasp that countries gain much more upside from pushing their economies to the brink only to be bailed out, than from engaging in real economic viability and sustainability programs: i.e., living within your means (something we proved empirically before). Finally, this is also a stark reminder that when one removes out all the bailout noise and the daily high-beta gyrations of sovereign debt, the real reason why sovereign bondholders should be buying Spanish debt - an actual improvement in its economy-  continues to not only be absent, but by the very nature of endless now-monthly bailouts, becomes impossible as debt never fixed more debt.