Investment Grade

Truly ironic - anyone receiving a REAL business/finance education would be able to run these rudimentary calculations themselves, thereby invalidating the very diploma they are seeking

Over the last few years, and at an increasing pace as of more recently, unions have become more and more confident of their ability to effect change and taken much more aggressive activist positions against the capitalist oppressors. The most recent examples range from California cities to Twinkies-maker Hostess Brands, and each time the stance from the unions appears to have been far more aggressive (and M.A.D. prone) than in the past. The question is why? Perhaps, as we tweeted following Hostess' liquidation:

Will the broke PBGC step in and fund Hostess' 18,000 workers suddenly vaporized pensions?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 16, 2012

...It is the confidence of an all-powerful government at their back with the US Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which is the backstop for private sector plans, providing cover. The problem is, as UBS explains, the PBGC has a huge deficit and is cashflow negative. This leads us to the uncomfortable expectation of further USD government support (bailout) or a more direct monetization by the Fed. PBGC could be impacted severely if a few large firms terminate their pensions. In this case, UBS expects PBGC to sell equities and buy long duration fixed income.

Bigger Tax Payer Bank Bailouts Cometh? If You Think Taxes Are Gonna Be Higher You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet! I welcome one and all to show me how it will not be so.

The last time the USD closed down (DXY -1%) on the week, and so did stocks (Dow/S&P/Nasdaq -0.25%), was the week heading into QE3 which marked the top of the US equity market for the year. With contracts rolling, the futures were roiling into the close as they were ping-ponged between new week lows and VWAP. The Dow Transports stood alone in their outperformance +1.1% (but were sliding rapidly into the close) and while most sectors were weak (Discretionary worst -1.2%), Materials outperformed (+1.66%) in a world of their own today. Silver slumped 2.4% on the week while Oil added 1% with gold flatlining since yesterday morning down around 0.5% on the week. AAPL, obviously, was the story today -7.75% in last 3 days to 10 month lows on huge volume today. EUR strength (+1.75%) dragged USD lower but was stymied by JPY weakness (-1.25%) as Treasury yields came off the week's highs to end 7-9bps higher on the week. VIX at two-week highs closed above Europe for the first time this year. Some peculiar volume and behavior in bond ETFs to note also (HYG saw biggest 2-day drop in a month) - markets feel very brittle up here.

Today is probably the first day in a while in which minute-by-minute rumors on the Fiscal Cliff will not be on the frontburner (with yet another late day rumor yesterday of an imminent deal turning out to be a dud, when it was reported that Obama's latest grand compromise was to lower his initial tax hike demand from $1.6 to $1.4 trillion, or still $600 billion more than last summer's negotiated number), with Ben Bernanke and QE4 taking center stage instead. By now it is a foregone conclusion that Ben will proceed with extending Twist as first predicted here, into an unsterilized bond buying operation, in effect confirming that there has been zero improvement in the economy, as another $1 trillion is about to be injected until the end of 2013, and more trillions after that. The good thing is that all pretense that the Fed cares about anything but the market is now gone. The bad thing is that the Fed will continue to take over the capital markets until it and the other central banks are the only traders remaining. The only question is whether the market, now well into massively overbought territory, will fizzle and snap back after Bernanke's news announcement, and will QE4EVA (as we believe QE3+1, aka QEternity-er, should be called) have been fully priced in by the time it was announced?

As in any other Ponzi scheme, when the weakest link breaks, the chain breaks. The risk of such a break-up, applied to economics, is known as systemic risk or “correlation going to 1”. As the weakest link (i.e. the Euro zone) was coupled to the chain of the Fed, global systemic risk (or correlation) dropped. Apparently, those managing a correlation trade in IG9 (i.e. investment grade credit index series 9) for a well-known global bank did not understand this. But it would be misguided to conclude that the concept has now been understood, because there are too many analysts and fund managers who still interpret this coupling as a success at eliminating or decreasing tail risk. No such thing could be farther from the truth. What they call tail risk, namely the break-up of the Euro zone is not a “tail” risk. It is the logical consequence of the institutional structure of the European Monetary Union, which lacks fiscal union and a common balance sheet.... And to think that because corporations and banks in the Euro zone now have access to cheap US dollar funding, the recession will not bring defaults, will be a very costly mistake. Those potential defaults are not a tail risk either: If you tax a nation to death, destroy its capital markets, nourish its unemployment, condemn it to an expensive currency and give its corporations liquidity at stupidly low costs you can only expect one outcome: Defaults. The fact that they shall be addressed with even more US dollars coming from the Fed in no way justifies complacency.

Yesterday we presented Goldman's first 3 Top Trades for 2013 as they come out, while also noting Goldman's recent disfatuation (sic) with gold. Today, we present Goldman's 4th Top Trade for 2013, which is, drumroll, to go long Spanish Government Bonds, specifically, the 5 year, which should be bought at a current yield of 4.30%. with a target of 3.50% and a stop loss of 5.50%. This reco comes out after the SPGB complex has already enjoyed unprecedented gains - but not driven by economic improvement, far from it - but merely on the vaporware threat of ECB OMT intervention. Of course, once the "threat of intervention" moves to "fact of intervention", everything will promptly unwind as it always does (QE was far more potent as a stock boost when it was merely a daily threat: the market's peak not incidentally occurred the day after Bernanke dropped his entire load: one simply can't move beyond infinity). And with Spain's massive bond buying cliff in Q1 2013, the days its bailout could be postponed are coming to an end.

The conflict between labor and capital is a long and illustrious one, and one in which ideology and politics have played a far greater role than simple economics and math. And while labor enjoyed a brief period of growth in the the past 100 years first due to the anti-trust and anti-monopoly, and pro-union laws and regulations taking place in the early 20th century US, and subsequently due to the era of "Great Moderation"-driven "trickling down" abnormal growth in the developed world, it is precisely the unwind of this latest period of prosperity, loosely known as "The New Normal", and in which economic growth will persist at well sub-optimal (<2%) rates for the foreseeable future, that is pushing the precarious balance between labor and capital costs - in their purest economic sense, and stripped of all ethics and ideology - to a point in which labor will likely find itself at a persistent disadvantage, leading to the same social upheaval that ushered in pure Marxist ideology in the late 19th century. Only this time there will be a peculiar twist, because while in relative terms labor costs as a percentage of all operating expenses are declining around the world, when accounting for benefits, and entitlement funding, labor costs are rising in absolute terms if at uneven rates and are now at record highs. Which sets the stage for what may probably be the biggest push-pull tension of the 21st century for the simple worker: declining relative wages, which however are increasing in absolute terms when factoring in the self-funded components paid into an insolvent welfare system. But the rub comes when one considers the biggest disequilibrium creator of all: central bank predicated cost of capital "planning", whereby Fed policies may be the most insidious and stealth destroyer of all of labor's hard won gains over the past century. 

Austerity is coming our way, it's just a matter in what manner and by how much, and whether it becomes an orderly or disorderly process. The fiscal cliff is really a bit of a ruse in that respect, but the key here is that years of fiscal profligacy is coming to an end and the Fed at this point, having used its bazookas, is now down to firecrackers. The economic outlook as such is completely muddled and along with that the prospect for any turnaround in corporate earnings... Once we get past the Fiscal Cliff we will confront the inherent inability of the Democrats and the GOP to embark on any grand bargain to blaze the trail for true fiscal reforms. The U.S. has not had a rewrite of its tax code since 1986, which was the year Microsoft went public and a decade prior to Al Gore's invention of the Internet. The tax system is massively inefficient and leads to a gross misallocation of resources that impedes economic progress — rewarding conspicuous consumption at the expense of savings and investment. It is the lingering uncertainty over the road to meaningful fiscal reform that is really the mot cause of the angst — the fiscal cliff is really a side show because who doesn't know that we are going to have a Khrushchev moment?

As we head into the last of this year and we confront various cliffs; fiscal and European, the threat of rising taxes for individuals and perhaps corporations should not be minimized. My best advice of today is to stop and look at your portfolios and take some profits and re-invest the proceeds or take profits and keep cash to be re-invested after the first of the year when we have either bumbled our way out of our predicament or behaved badly and find ourselves in a morass with all of the markets rolling about on their backside. It makes no difference as to your viewpoint and it takes no socially charged adjectives to reach a correct opinion; our President wants more and increased social programs and he wants those with the money to pay for them. Now you have one and one-half months to make preparations.

Stocks tend to experience very long periods (5-20 years) of either anemic or exceptional returns, which UBS calls Investment Regimes. Somewhat surprisingly (to some), they note that returns during these periods are not driven by divergences in economic or earnings growth. Rather, Investment Regimes are defined by secular multiple expansion or contraction - and it is critical to understand this dynamic as over the past 40 years (and four regimes) investors have tended to focus on only one dynamic at a time. From the 'Disco' regime to the 'Hangover II', UBS explains in a few simple charts why all eyes should be focused on high-yield credit - as we have noted time and again. Inflation signals are gone, the 'Fed model' is broken, and investment grade credit is too repressed to matter (until it does!)...

Life imitates math.

European stocks popped at the open and then generally trod water for the rest of the day. The initial liquid-driven surge had no follow through and in fact European sovereigns bled wider most of the day - with Greek govvies now down almost 10% (in price) in the last week.  Credit markets re-racked along with stocks - with XOver outperforming and Main (investment grade) underperforming (along with financials). The story of the day was yet another 100pip-or-so rampapalooza in EURUSD - the 3rd in 5 days - as we noted earlier, when everything else is shut, EUR is simplest lever to drive markets higher given the correlations (and no Treasury police to keep things under control). Despite today's push, Spain's IBEX remains -0.5% on the week (as its peers are all up around 0.5%) and Italy and Spain bond spreads are up around 15bps on the week. So with EUR up around 0.22% vs USD on the week and fulcrum securities from Spain down, take your pick on where risk is being flushed.

With all the hope slooshing around the world, it is likely no surprise that some risk-reward connections have 'broken' or become misaligned. In an effort to simplify the view of asset class risk and return, we present Morgan Stanley's Yield vs Volatility chart. It seems relatively plain to see that the Russell 2000 (and European stocks SX5E) are dramatically over-priced (under-'yielded') relative to their risk, while Asian and European High Yield credit (and to a lesser extent Asian and European Investment Grade Credit) are trading notably cheap relative to their volatility. So for all those performance chasing asset-allocators who remain fundamental bulls, buying European High Yield credit seems the best bang for your buck - instead of piling into more Russell 2000 beta...interestingly the S&P 500 appears 'fair' compared to risky sovereigns, global stocks, and global credits from a risk-reward perspective.

Fear the truth, it shall set fundamental market forces free!