Central Banks

Yesterday, when charting the global multi-trillion central bank stealth reliquification (aka the primary driver for the market to surge 20% in the past several months, and since "the market, or Russell 2000 is the economy" just as the ChairSatan, to result in what naive commentators define as an economic bounce), we said "As a reminder, when gold was at $1900 last summer, central banks had pumped about $2 trillion less into the markets. We expect the market to grasp this discrepancy shortly." With gold about $30 bucks higher, the market is finally starting to "grasp it", and is now back to $1755, as silver passes $34. 

The day dawns with a deal for Greece that is full of smoke and mirrors; lies and deceptions. It is a deal pretty much as expected and, as I have said before, now the realities are going to be confronted. Europe has spun the agreement and the Euro has rallied some and the S&P futures are up but the next few weeks, I am afraid, will hold some serious disappointments. The page turns today because now we are about to confront not what is told to us but the actuality of what has been presented to us and just what will happen as a result.

Think this time around finally the Greek deal is done? Think again. OpenEurope lists the "many" questions still surrounding the second Greek bailout that remain unanswered. We would add that this is hardly an exhaustive list, and believe the key question, to put it simply, is a CAC is a MAC? Because if the answer is yes, the deal is off.

Heading into the North American open, equities are trading lower with the benchmark EU volatility index up 1.6%, with financials underperforming on concerns that the latest Greek bailout deal will need to be revised yet again. Officials said that the deal will require Greece’s private creditors to take a deeper write-down on the face value of their EUR 200bln in holdings than first agreed. The haircut on the face value of privately held Greek debt will now be over 53%. As a result of the measures adopted, the creditors now assume that Greece’s gross debt will fall to just over 120% of GDP by 2020, from around 164% currently, according to the officials. However as noted by analysts at the Troika in their latest debt sustainability report - “…there are notable risks. Given the high prospective level and share of senior debt, the prospects for Greece to be able to return to the market in the years following the end of the new program are uncertain and require more analysis”. Still, Bunds are down and a touch steeper in 2/10s under moderately light volume, while bond yield spreads around Europe are tighter.

While we await for Thomas Stolper to issue his latest flip flop and to go long the EURUSD again ("tactically", not "strategically"), here is Francesco Garzarelli's take on the Greek bailout.Here is the biggest issue: "Increased likelihood of CDS: Moreover, higher losses inflicted on the private sector, involving the likely activation of CACs and the triggering of CDS, represent sources of near-term volatility." Bingo. Now as we pointed out in the previous post, a "successful" and completely undefined PSI program is a key precondition to the program. However, with bondholders now certain to throw up, and the requisite 75% (forget 95%) acceptance threshold unlike to be reached, will the use of Collective Action Clauses, and thus a CDS trigger constitute a PSI failure, and thus deal breach? In other words, since we now know that the March 20 bond payment will be part of the PSI, is last night's farce merely a way to avoid giving Greece a bridge loan, and putting its fate in the hands of creditors, which as we noted back in January is a lose-lose strategy?

Below are the main points agreed to by Greece to re-secure the €130b bailout, first agreed upon in July 2011, courtesy of Bloomberg.

Those who have been correct about the crisis in recent years question whether a new Greek government will stick to the deeply unpopular program after elections due in April and believe Athens could again fall behind in implementation, prompting lenders to pull the plug once the eurozone has stronger financial firewalls in place. The much used phrase "kicking the can down the road" underestimates the risks being created by European and international policy makers. Some have rightly warned that we will likely soon run out of road. Rather than "kicking the can down the road" what politicians in Europe, in the U.S. and internationally are actually doing is "kicking a giant beer keg down the road".  The giant beer keg is the continual resort to cheap money in the form of ultra loose monetary policies, QE1, QE2, QE3 etc, money printing and electronic money creation on a scale never seen before in history. The road is our modern international financial and monetary system. The risk is that attempting to kick the giant beer keg down the road will lead to many broken feet and a destroyed road.  A European, US, Japanese and increasingly global debt crisis will not be solved by creating more debt and making taxpayers pay odious debts incurred through massively irresponsible lending practices of international banks. The likelihood of continuing massive liquidity injections by the ECB next week and in the coming weeks will help keep the opportunity cost of holding bullion the lowest it has ever been and likely contribute to higher bullion prices especially in euro terms in the coming months.

JPM brings some less than good news for the administration, which unless planning to propose another $500 billion or so gas price offsetting fiscal stimulus (which would bring total US debt to $17 trillion by the end of 2012) may find itself with the bulk of its electorate unable to drive to the voting booths come November. In a just revised crude forecast, JPM commodity analyst Larry Eagles, has hiked both his Crude and Brent expectations across the board, and now sees WTI going from $105 currently to a $120 by the end of the year, $4 higher than his prior forecast. Alas, since in another report from this morning titled "Return of Asset Reflation" JPM finally figures out what we have been saying for months, namely that the stealthy global central bank liquidity tsunami is finally spilling out of equity markets and into everything else, inflation is about to become a substantially topic in pre-election propaganda. As a reminder, when gold was at $1900 last summer, central banks had pumped about $2 trillion less into the markets. We expect the market to grasp this discrepancy shortly.

Mainstream media is desperately scrambling to fill copy with stories of collaboration, rescue, heroism, sacrifice, and altruism among the European leaders. The dismal reality facing real people and real participants is quite different and as Peter Tchir points out "How many 'untruths' have become so accepted that they are now treated as facts or axioms". In an effort to get to the facts and reality, we disentangle Bloomberg's 'Greek Rescue' story and note the increasingly Orwellian nature of the events unfolding across the pond. But anyways, the machine is grinding along towards headlines of "rescue" where Greece will have been "saved" and "default will have been avoided" and it will be "great that banks and politicians worked to save Greece" in spite of the "lingering doubts that Greece will fulfill its obligations".

I am staggered at how easily the concepts of Democracy and the Rule of Law – two of the pillars of the modern world – have been brushed aside in the interests of political expediency. This is not just a eurozone phenomenon but of course the removal of elected governments and the instalment of "insider" technocrats who simply serve the interests of the elite has become a specialisation in Europe. Many will think this kind of development is not a big deal and is instead may be what is needed. Personally I am absolutely certain that the kind of totalitarianism being pushed on us by our leaders will – if allowed to persist and fester – end with consequences which are way beyond anything the printing presses of our central banks could ever hope to contain. Communism failed badly. Why then are we arguably trying to resurrect a version of it, particularly in Europe? Are the banks so powerful that we are all beholden to them and the biggest nonsense of all – that defaults should never happen (unless said defaults are trivial or largely meaningless)?...– So, in terms of markets, be warned. My personal recommendation is to sit in Gold and non-financial high quality corporate credit and blue-chip big cap non-financial global equities. Bond and Currency markets are now so rigged by policy makers that I have no meaningful insights to offer, other than my bubble fears...The end of the bubble will be sign posted by either monetary anarchy creating major real economy inflation or by a deflationary credit collapse (if they run out of pumping "mandates"). The end game is incredibly binary in my view, but in between it is pretty much a random walk. Either way, "bonds are toast" in any secular timeframe (due either to huge inflationary pressures, or due to a deflationary credit collapse), which in turn means that asset bubbles in risky assets will get crushed on a secular basis.

• Germany FinMin: More Talks Needed On 2nd Greece Bailout Plan (MarketNews)
• You stand up to the bankers, you win - Icelandic Anger Bringing Record Debt Relief in Best Crisis Recovery Story (Bloomberg)
• Iranian ships reach Syria, China warns of civil war (Reuters)
• Men's suit bubble pops? Zegna CEO Says China Sales Slowing (WSJ)
• German presidency row shakes Merkel's coalition (Reuters)
• Greece must default if it wants democracy (FT)
• Decision day for second Greek bailout despite financing gaps (Reuters)
• So true fair value is a 30% discount to "market" price? Board of Wynn Resorts Forcibly Buys Out Founder (WSJ)
• Spain Sinks Deeper Into Periphery on Debt Rise (Bloomberg)
• Walmart raises stake in China e-commerce group (FT)
• Iron Lady Merkel Bucks German Street on Greek Aid (Bloomberg)

The week ahead is fairly light on big ticket data releases, but what is released will provide more evidence of the strength of global activity. The most important of these will be the flash PMIs for China and the Euro area and the German IFO reading . There is no consensus expectation for the China print, however the Euro area indices are both expected to rise slightly, as is the German IFO. In terms of cyclical hard data, Taiwan export orders and IP for Singapore and Taiwan, Euro area industrial orders and trade data from Japan and Thailand will be notable. Admittedly the data from Asia is likely to be complicated by Chinese New Year which fell in the third week of January, and presumably this is why the consensus expects such a sharp drop in Taiwan IP, however the data are still worth watching for indications of the strength in global activity. Generally, consensus expectations for these prints are not particularly encouraging and any 'beats' would be a positive surprise. It goes without saying that ongoing negotiations towards signing off on Greece's second package will also remain on the radar screen. As we write, Reuters has posted suggestions that the debt swap will be open by March 8 and complete by March 11.

Now that the bipolar market has once again resynced general risk appetite with the EURUSD (high Euro -> high ES and vice versa), everything in the macro front aside from European developments, is noise (and the occasional reminder by data adjusting authorities in the US that the country can in fact decouple with the entity responsible for half the world's trade. This will hardly come as a surprise to anyone. In fact, the conventional wisdom as shown by Goldman's latest client poll has European sovereign crisis worries far in the lead of all macro risks. Behind it are Iran and nuclear tensions, China hard-landing, the US recovery/presidential election and the Japanese trade deficit/record debt/JGB issues. Which for all intents and purposes means that the next big "surprise" to the market will be none of the above. What are some of the factor not listed as big macro risks? According to David Kostin 'Risks that clients did not mention include late March US Supreme Court review of health care reform (implications for 12% of S&P 500); mid-year deadline to implement Dodd-Frank financial reform (14% of market); and the French Presidential election on April 22nd where polls show incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy trails opposition candidate Francois Hollande." Oddly enough, one very crucial item missing is once again surging inflation courtesy of trillions in stealthy central banks reliquification, sending crude to the highest since May 2011, and the most expensive gas price in January on record.

When the prospect of a nation being unable to roll over a paltry few Euros of maturing debt is enough to galvanise the entire financial world into monetary excess exceeding anything imaginable as recently as late 2007, one must conclude that the markets are skating on the thinnest ice in their entire existence. But skate they are.

All the pseudo-scientific yada-yada on economic theory are just hollow bones thrown to journalists and pundits to have something to “chew” on and write about. The only thing that matters is the monetization of more and more government debt, and how to sell it to the public. Paul Krugman would argue that despite all the “quantitative easing” inflation has not really picked up. At zero percent interest rates, money has no preference – there is no opportunity cost of just “lying around” without interest. Investing money for 4 years for 0.15% return is not “riskless return” – it’s “return-less risk”. Perversely, the Fed has created a situation where raising interest rates would probably lead to inflation. It is boxed into ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) for infinity. Things will get serious once the Fed adopts a policy called N-GDP targeting. Instead of inflation, the Fed will try to “target” nominal GDP. If real GDP growth is zero, the nominal GDP growth will be made up entirely of inflation. Debt is a nominal unit, and it is supported by nominal GDP. In order to keep the ratio between GDP and debt halfway bearable, GDP must be inflated. It is a tax on everybody holding dollars, since the value of those will decline. Meanwhile, the Japanese are resorting to stealth interventions to break the Yen’s strength.    Currency wars have gone from “cold” to “hot”. The Fed’s printing of dollars is forcing other central banks to purchase them and selling their own currency in the hope of stemming their own currency’s rise. This makes them involuntary buyers of Treasury bills and bonds, making it easier for the US government to finance its deficit.