Central Banks

Having been heralded around the world for solving Europe's crisis, ECB head Mario Draghi confidently states (as does every other central banker in the world) that "should the inflation outlook worsen, we would immediately take preventive steps". However, a recent analysis by Tornell and Westermann at VOX suggests the ECB has hit its limit with regard to its anti-inflationary fighting measures. The ECB appears to have lost control over standard measures of tightening: short-term interest rates (since short-term lending to banks has dropped to practically zero), increase in minimum reserve requirements (practically impossible withouit crushing the banks that they have propped up due to the sharp asymmetries - the recent cut from 2% to 1% minimum reserves saw a remarkable EUR104bn drop), and finally asset sales (the quantity of 'sensitive' or encumbered assets on the ECB's books has reached such a scale - due to LTRO, SMP, and ELA programs - leaving the 'sellable' non-sensitive assets at a level below excess deposits for the first time in ECB history). As the authors note, while this does not immediately produce an inflation flare, the lack of maneuvering space will induce an inflationary bias to ECB monetary policy as Draghi will find it increasingly expensive  at the margin to hit the anti-inflationary brakes. "This bias puts the Eurozone at risk of de-anchoring long-run inflationary expectations. The danger is not inflation today, but the de-anchoring of expectations about future inflation." As we have noted many times before, the ECB (and for that matter most central banks in the world) need Goldilocks.

It is rather surprising that in a world in which anything and everything is only about money, it is next to impossible to find a consolidated balance sheet of the world's insolvent economies (i.e., the developed countries: US, Japan and the Euro Area). So for all those seeking a visual presentation of all the liabilities that have to be inflated away by the central banks (because that's what this is all about), rejoice: the broke world is presented below in its glory. The irony is that the problem would be quite fixable if it weren't for one minor issue: the bulk of the world's assets also happen to be its liabilities! At the end of the day, this may prove to be the fatal flaw in the chairman's attempt to dilute the global liabilities, he will be doing the same with the assets.

Following the May 2010 flash crash, the investing public hoped that as part of its "exhaustive report", the SEC would find and hold responsible the various components of a broken market structure, be it HFTs, ETFs, stubbing and sub-pennying algorithms, and all the other knowns and unknowns we have covered over the years. Instead, in what would prove to be a move of cataclysmic stupidity (if sadly understandable - the SEC, like everyone else "in charge" is used to dealing with a gullible and simplistic public, which has no access to the real data and analysis, and whose opinion could be easily manipulated, at least until now), the regulator blamed and scapegoated it all on a Waddell and Reed trade (we wonder just what the quid pro quo was to get the asset manager to roll over and take the blame despite protestations to the contrary, at least in the beginning). The result was that the same investing public realized that market structure is so corrupt, and so robotically mutated, there is no place for the small investor in this broken market. Last week's BATS IPO fiasco merely confirmed this. And as usual, BATS (whose chairman Ratterman has just been demoted even as he stays on as CEO) decided to take the "passive voice" approach and blame it all on a faceless, emotionless, motiveless "software glitch". Just like that perfectly innocuous BSOD we have all grown to love and expect any minute. Only it wasn't. To get to the bottom of what really happened, in a world in which the SEC is far more interested in finding the latest discount internet porn stream than actually protecting the small investor, we relied on our friends from Nanex, who have time and again proven to have a far better grasp of what it is that really happens in the market than virtually anyone else. And if Nanex' interpretation of events is correct (spoiler alert - it was not a "software glitch") it takes SkyNet wars from the silver screen and to a trading terminal near you. What happened is that a malicious, 100% intentional Nasdaq algorithm purposefully brought BATS stock to a price of 0.00 within 900 millisecond of the company's break for trading! This is open SkyNet warfare.

While much has been made of the public side the ECB's money-printing facade whereby any and every piece of junk collateral can be lodged with the lender-of-first-last-and-only-resort in return for shiny new Euros to spend on government bonds (or save as the case seems to be), there is another facility - the Emergency Liquidity Assistance program (ELA) - that skirts under the radar. As Goldman notes today, the ELA enables the National Central Banks (NCBs) to provide 'liquidity' beyond and above the regular refinancing operations. While the amounts are not quite on the scale of the LTRO, they are large and continue to play a crucial role in stabilizing certain segments of the Euro area banking sector. But, of course, as seems always to be the case, the unintended consequence of this temporary emergency facility is that it appears to have become a permanent facility. This consequence has two rather ugly consequences, it removes still further collateral (assets encumbered) from bank balance sheets and further delays the needed adjustment process (read deleveraging) across the banking sector.

While the previous two lectures have had a clear message - Central Banks good, Gold Standard bad, Stability Only Through Central Planning - today's lecture, while unequivocally net positive for the staggering power of the Fed to do what it wants, was less focused. With only one use of the words 'CDO' and 'Save'-the-world, Bernanke focused on the threat of Depression (14 times) and the world-ending 'M.A.D.-bringing' event that would have been the end of AIG (29 times!). With the word mortgage dominant (75 times) and 'Fail' bandied around 33 times, it is clear where Bernanke sees the blame and how the saving of AIG truly was a Flash Gordon moment. Nowhere is this bias better indicated than the 9 uses of the 'People' compared to the 104 uses of the word 'Bank' and should you feel that this was a 'save' by the Fed, the word 'Rescue' does not appear once during the 11,431 word diatribe.

UPDATE (via Bloomberg): *BERNANKE: `FORCEFUL' RESPONSE PREVENTED WORSE RECESSION and AIG HAS STABILIZED - phewee...

Today could be the day when all your beliefs and misconceptions of the great central banking machine are set straight. After explaining to us in the previous two lecture how the gold standard is just silly, why central banks are constitutionally awesome, and how the Fed almost single-handedly created the US since World War II, today's piece-de-resistance is Bernanke's take on his own response to the financial crisis. We are sure it will be thorough in its discussion of the massive and entirely hidden loans for nothing that were given to the banks, how they encouraged the risk-taking that led to it via their regulatory mis-controls, and removing MtM and unlimited free-money helped the world go around - all the while maintaining a strong-dollar policy inline with Treasury's apparent mandate. As far as Word-Bingo: Tweet if you hear the word 'Helicopter' or 'Printing Press' or 'Level 3 Assets are all worthless illiquid junk at best' and if Bernanke says 'CDO' more than 10 times, we all get an animated silver bear.

UPDATE: Added link to Matthew Bishop's ebook 'In Gold We Trust'

On a day where gold surged generously on the same thesis with which it managed a five-fold increase in the last decade or so - that of paper money debasement - we thought it appropriate to get some context as to the yellow metal's history, current implications, and potential future. In a mere 111 seconds, we are treated to a history of sound money (from Croesus to The Bank of England to The Great Depression), the growing division between some of the world's most-famous smartest investors with regards to Gold's price (Buffett vs Paulson/Bass), Governments and Central Banks Spending and Printing 'experiments', and a discussion of the endgame of "Where Will All The Money Go?" - all with the help of a magical cartoon hand. As it seems the profligate control of the electronic press is now all that matters to an increasingly correlated and blind-leading-the-ignorant markets, perhaps it pays to consider how markets have changed reactions to the threat promise of the extreme easing upon which the equity market's heart beats so strongly. Once anxious of bond vigilantes (taken care of via LTRO reacharounds and direct Fed monetization), FX markets remain intervention-prone (just ask Azumi how many times he looks at JGBs or JPY risk-reversals every day), and finally to the stock (and vol) markets as 'Bernanke's trailing-strike Put' ensures 'the wealth effect' buoys us all the chosen few to greater and greater spending disconnects between value and price and potentially larger and larger mal-allocations of capital. With Corporate cash stockpiles so huge - the "Where Is John Galt?" line can't help but appear in many minds as reinvestment in a dilapidated, aging, increasingly less cash flow generating asset base remains to be seen.

Earlier today we presented an extended case by Caixin's Andy Xie, who is now confident that a massive 40% devaluation of the Yen is imminent and inevitable (with dire consequences for regional trading partners), as the opportunity cost, now that the Japanese economy is no longer competitive in the New Normal world (read trade surplus) of delaying what every other central banks has been doing so well (just observe the nominal surge in risk assets at 8 am this morning when Bernanke made it clear more real dilution is coming, as predicted here just yesterday), is the 3 decade long overdue pop in the JGB bond market. Yet as Xie notes, either of these two bubbles popping - the JPY or the JGB - is fraught with danger as both will confirm that three decades of central planning have failed. What is worse, Japan would then become a case study for failed central planning (yes, redundant), everywhere, but nowhere more than in the US. Which in turn, would not be a surprise to most, or at least to those who don't chase dead end momentum trends and heatmapped assets in simplistic hopes of finding a greater fool 1 millisecond into the future. It also would not be a surprise to anyone who sees the following chart from John Lohman which shows the gradual failure of central planning since the second global depression started in 2007 (and offset to date by $7 trillion in central bank private-to-public risk offset), during which time the BOJ has been forced to load up its balance sheet with substantially more assets than its GDP has grown by. Alas, this trend will accelerate which is why with time the exponential chart of central bank balance sheet expansion will only get more "exponential" until it finally pops, bringing with it an end to the truly last bubble. We can only hope we are somewhere far away when that happens.

Taking Bernanke’s statement to indicate that QE is coming in April is wishful thinking at best. Bernanke’s actual words imply, if anything, that the Fed may have failed to fix the US economy. This is more of the Fed playing damage control because the reality is that Bernanke is well aware of this:  by the Fed’s own data we’re clearly in a structural Depression, NOT a cyclical recession.

Few men have a resume quite like Jon Corzine.  Not only has Corzine served in the U.S. Senate and been governor of New Jersey, he has also been the CEO of Goldman Sachs and the recently imploded brokerage firm MF Global.   The insider blood filtrated through cronyism and the endless squandering of the public dime flows heavily through his veins. When MF Global went belly up back in the fall, Corzine was finally revealed for the inept, overly connected bureaucrat he really is.  Corruption seemingly follows the former Senator, Governor, and banker like shadows on a sunny day.  Earlier this week, New Jersey was declared the least corruptible state in the union much to the surprise of, well, everyone.  But as the great Jonathan Weil pointed out, the methodology in the study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity was horribly flawed.

Every quarter the Office of the Currency Comptroller releases its report on Bank Derivative Activities, and every quarter we find that the Too Big To Fail get Too Bigger To Fail. To wit: in Q4 2011, of the total $230.8 trillion in US outstanding derivatives, the Top 5 banks (JPM, BofA, Morgan Stanley, Goldman and HSBC) accounted for 95.7% of all Derivatives. In some respects this is good news: in Q2, the Top 5 banks held 95.9% of the $250 trillion in derivatives. Unfortunately it is also bad news, because $220 trillion is more than enough for the world to collapse in a daisy chained failure of bilateral netting (which not even all the central banks in the world can offset). What is the worst news, is that the just released report indicates that in addition to everything else, we have now hit peak delusion, as banks now report to the OCC that a record high 92.2% of gross credit exposure is "bilaterally netted." While we won't spend much time on this issue now, it is safe to say that bilateral netting is the biggest lie in modern finance (read How US Banks Are Lying About Their European Exposure; Or How Bilateral Netting Ends With A Bang, Not A Whimper for an explanation of this fraud which was exposed completely in the AIG collapse). And just to put this in global perspective, according to the BIS in the first half of 2011, global derivative gross exposure increased by $107 trillion to a record $707 trillion. It will be quite interesting to get the full year report to see if this acceleration in gross exposure has increased. Because if it has, we will now know that in 2011 European banks were forced up to load up on several hundred trillion in mostly interest rate swap exposure. Which can only mean one thing: when and if central banks lose control of government bond curves, an rates start moving wider again, the global margin call will be unprecedented. Until then we can just delude ourselves that central planners have everything under control, have everything under control, have everything under control.

Deny that, bottom deniers.

In Don Coxe's latest and typically excellent letter, "All Clear?", he highlights the opportunity in precious metals mining companies: "If there were one over-arching theme at the BMO Global Metals & Mining Conference, it was that the gold miners are upset and even embarrassed that their shares have so dramatically underperformed bullion...  "On the one hand, they were delighted in 2011 when it was reported that since Nixon closed the gold window, a bar of bullion had delivered higher investment returns than the S&P 500 for forty years-- with dividends reinvested. But some gold mining CEOs find it an insult that what they mine is more respected than their companies' shares...  "In our view, we have entered the most favourable era for gold prices in our lifetime, and the share prices of the great mining companies will eventually outperform bullion prices." As Don Coxe makes clear, governments are running deficits "beyond the forecasts of all but the hardiest goldbugs five years ago; central banks are printing money and creating liquidity beyond the forecasts of all but the most paranoid goldbugs a year ago." The choice for the saver is essentially binary: hold money in ever-depreciating paper, or in a tangible vehicle that has the potential to rise dramatically as expressed in paper money terms.

Short term, the bulls will probably remain in control. 

Big picture: the markets are being held together via a very tenuous balancing act on the part of EU leaders and the world Central Banks. The short-term bias will be bullish due to the factors listed above. But big trouble is lurking just beneath the surface. And should anything upset the current balance being maintained, we could see some real fireworks in the markets in short order.