Central Banks

Capitalism isn’t – wasn’t – the problem. The culprit instead was unsound finance and deeply flawed monetary management. In short, Capitalism cannot function effectively within a backdrop of unfettered cheap finance. Things appear miraculous during the boom, and then the bust discombobulates. Contemporary central bank rate administration essentially abandoned the self-adjusting and regulating market system for determining the price of finance – so fundamental to Capitalism.

"It’s different this time works very well if you need to rationalize how to beat your return benchmark next quarter or win an election." The truth is that central banks cannot manipulate raw supply and demand the way they can financial assets.

China is just the latest Central Bank to lose control. Is the Fed next?

"... you can bet that whenever an earthquake like this happens, especially when it’s triggered by two invisible tectonic plates like put gamma and call gamma and then cascades through arcane geologies like options expiration dates and ETF pricing software, both the media and self-interested parties will begin a mad rush to find someone or something a tad bit more obvious to blame. So you end up getting every investment process that uses a computer – from high frequency trading to risk parity allocations to derivative hedges – all lumped together in one big shotgun blast"

What is surprising about Japan is that unlike most of Europe, which has opted to adopt a Negative Interest Rate Policy, or NIRP,  is that Japan whose monetary policy became a basket case years ago - Japan is currently on QE10 - it still hasn't thrown in the "all-in" towel and announced negative rates. This may have officially changed yesterday, when in an auction that flew deep under the radar, Japan sold 1 Year (not 3 Month) Bills at the most negative yield in history, or -0.0418%, nearly doubly more negative the -0.0252% yield on the September 16 auction.

The 2007-2008 financial crash was not a black swan. That is a collective lie propagated by policy makers so they don’t cry themselves to sleep at night. Many different people predicted and profited from the 2008 crisis. It was about the fear of failing banks and crashing markets... but the true horror was the impending collapse of the entire fiat money system that never came to be. That was the true black swan. 

News That Matters

Central banks are fearful and unwilling to normalize but artificially high valuations across asset classes cannot be sustained indefinitely absent fundamental global growth. Central banks are in a prison of their own design and we are trapped with them. The next great crash will occur when we collectively realize that the institutions that we trusted to remove risk are actually the source of it. The truth is that global central banks cannot remove extraordinary monetary accommodation without risking a complete collapse of the system, but the longer they wait the more they risk their own credibility, and the worse that inevitable collapse will be. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, global central banks have set up the greatest volatility trade in history.

You’re doing yourself a disservice if you don't have a basic working knowledge of what, say, a volatility surface means. We're not saying that we all have to become volatility traders to survive in the market jungle today, any more than we all have to become game theorists to avoid being the sucker at the Fed’s communication policy table. And if you want to remove yourself as much as possible from the machines, then find a niche in the public markets where dark strategies have little sway. Muni bonds, say, or MLPs. The machines will find you eventually, but for now you’re safe. But if you’re a traditional investor whose sandbox includes big markets like the S&P 500, then you’re only disadvantaging yourself by ignoring this stuff. Ignorance is not bliss...

"The economic numbers released yesterday can best be described with a reference to wheels falling off the bus. And it wasn’t just retail sales and PPI in the U.S. but numbers from around the world, including China. So, of course, when I woke up this morning the obvious first question to ask was, how much are equities up?"

The “smart money” and by that we mean the more informed, aware and prudent investors and institutions internationally continue to have an allocation to gold and or add to existing allocations. The less informed continue to not understand or disparage gold and focus almost solely on gold’s short term price action rather than gold’s long term attributes as a hedging instrument and a safe haven asset.

Once again, Jefferies' one-month early glimpse at Wall Street trading revenues proved to be spot on. After the boutique mid-market banks reported a total collapse in fixed income trading revenues (which ended up negative following massive charge offs), everyone was looking at the biggest hedge fund among the TBTF banks - Goldman Sachs - to see just how bad the trading environment really is. The answer came moments ago, and the answer is bad. Very bad.

Aside from Chinese monetary data, it was a relatively quiet session in which traders were focusing on every move in the suddenly tumbling USD, and parsing every phrase by central bankers around the globe, as well as the previously noted piece by Fed mouthpiece Jon Hilsenrath which effectively ended the debate whether there will be rate hikes in 2015. Adding to the overnight froth were ECB speakers first Ewald Nowotny and then Spain's Restoy, who said that euro-area core inflation "clearly" below goal, remarks which were immediately assumed to signal increasing pressure to boost stimulus, and which promptly translated into even more weakness in EUR and equity strength, pushing US futures up about 15 points from yesterday's close.

Between the plunging market-implied rate-hike probabilities and Fed-Whsiperer Jon Hilsenrath's WSJ piece this evening strongly hinting at no hikes in 2015, the 'relief' rally in Asian FX (and Japanese stocks) is - in a word - insane. If the world's central banks mandates are "price stability" in whatever format they believe that to manifest, they have well and truly failed. The Won has jumped most since 2011, Ringgit and Rupiah are soaring over 2%, and Nikkei 225 is up over 400 points from the US session close...