Yen

"To end our discussion of the forex markets, we think it is time to return to an old friend: long of the English speaking currencies/short of the Yen and we shall do so en masse this morning" - Gartman, May 12

Marc Faber Contrarian Bet Against Market Consensus - US Treasuries

Special thanks to Dr. Marc Faber for giving us permission to publish excerpts from his May Gloom Boom & Doom Report.

Monetizing the entirety of gross government bond issuance and amassing an equity portfolio worth just shy of $100 billion on the way to cornering the entire ETF market may come across as insanely irresponsible even in a world that is now defined by insanely irresponsible central banks, but Haruhiko Kuroda does not care because when it comes to QE and the financing of governments via central bank-assisted ponzi schemes, no one does it like the BoJ.

Following yesterday's turbulent bond trading session, where the volatility after the worst Bid to Cover in a Japanese bond auction since 2009 spread to Europe and sent Bund yields soaring again, in the process "turmoiling" equities, today's session has been a peaceful slumber barely interrupted by "better than expected" Italian and a German Bund auction, both of which concluded without a hitch, and without the now traditional "technical" failure when selling German paper. Perhaps that was to be expected considering the surge in the closing yield from 0.13% to 0.65%. Not hurting the bid for 10Y US Treasury was yesterday's report that Japan had bought a whopping $23 billion in US Treasurys in March, the most in 4 years so to all those shorting Tsys - you are now once again fighting the Bank of Japan.

It all started again in Asia, although not in China where the berserker mania bid for stocks has returned and the SHCOMP is now up nearly 5% in the past two days following the PBOC's latest easing, but in Japan where once again the massively illiquid JGB market, of which the BOJ owns roughly a third as of this moment, is going through yet another shock period (if not quite VaR yet) with last night's 10 Year JGB auction seeing the lowest Bid to Cover since 2009. This was the beginning, and promptly thereafter bond yields around the globe spiked once more, with 10-year Treasury yields climbing to a five-month high, as the global rout in debt markets deepened. The biggest casualty so far is the Bund, which having retraced some of the flash crash losses from two weeks ago is once again in panic selling mode, and while not having taken out the recent 0.8% flash crash wides, traded just shy of 0.75% this morning.

Today's 10Y JGB auction saw the lowest bid-to-cover ratio since Feb 2009 at just 2.24x with a notable tail of 1.1bps (the widest since March) as it appears once again, the total dissolution of liquidity from the largest bond market in the world has left the BoJ and Ministry of Finance losing control. The reaction is dramatic with 5Y through 30Y yields up 5-8bps (10Y +8bps at 47.6bps - the biggest absolute jump in yields in 2 years) leaving 30Y yields at 2-month highs above 1.49% and 10Y yields at 6-month highs.

As the years have passed without Washington hearing, Russia and China have finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war. Had there been any intelligent, qualified people in the National Security Council, the State Department, or the Pentagon, Washington would have been warned away from the neocon policy of sowing distrust. But with only neocon hubris present in the government, Washington made the mistake that could be fateful for humanity.

In the new paranormal, you don't use wheelbarrows to move your worthless fiat currency, you use exoskeletons...

A straightforward analysis of the near-term outlook for the dollar, oil, 10-year US and German yields and the S&P 500.  

The trends in both Japanese income and spending moved downward not at the inception of the tax increase but at the very start of QQE itself. Science is the study of observation whereas monetary economics has become the science of avoiding them. If economists want to see recovery in that they should be honest about so redefining the term. BoJ is two years into QQE and the hole that has been dug for the Japanese people is enormous, so it will be extremely difficult at this point just to get back to even without ever accounting for lost opportunity for compounding and time. Maybe that doesn’t count as the typical, natural recession but it is nothing short of a man-made disaster.

Threatened with deflation, the authorities will want to turn the tide in the worst possible way. What’s the worst way to stop deflation? With hyperinflation. Yes, we may suffer a year or two more of sluggish growth... or even deflation. Stocks will crash and people will be desperate for paper dollars. But sooner or later, the feds will find their feet and lose their heads. Most likely, the credit-drenched world of 2015 will end... not in a whimper of deflation, but in a bang. Hyperinflation will bring the long depression to a dramatic close long before a quarter of a century has passed.

As investors and traders ponder what’s next for the financial world’s safe haven asset par excellence, and as everyone from the world’s most famous bond traders to the ECB tries to comprehend how the market could have possibly become so thin so fast, we bring you a bit more in the way of visual proof that central planners have become the world’s greatest bubble blowers as well as a bit of history that may hold clues as to what's next.

"A 10% correction from the high projects to 1890 on the S&P. Those shall be our targets to the downside and all the while we shall argue that the bull market is still in effect and that at the most severe we are to be neutral of shares until such time as those targets are high or until such time as there is a clear indication that the correction has run its course and has turned for the better."

Here is more insight to the recent USD rally... And why nothing looks like it seems!