Central Banks

A strong yen strikes again. 

With everything from stocks and bonds to 'roo bellies rising as one trade, it may be a good time to ask: what's priced into the market's uptrend? We say "bad news is priced in" when negative news is well-known and the market has absorbed that information via the repricing process. When the market has absorbed all the "good news," then we say the market is "priced to perfection:" that is, the market has not just priced in good news, it has priced in the expectation of further good news. Markets that are priced to perfection are fiendishly sensitive to unexpected bad news that disrupts the expectation of continuing positive news. So what have global markets priced into this uptrend across virtually all markets? 

EU stock futures have come off the initial lows at the open today following news that EU’s Rehn expects a PSI conclusion to be reached over the weekend, however this news comes amid the IIF’s offer to private bondholders of a 70% haircut. Further Greek PSI talks are expected later in the session following a meeting between IIF’s Dallara and Greek PM Papademos in Athens at 1630GMT. Euribor 3-month rate fixing continues to decline, however the pace at which the rates are falling is slowing, showing a fall of 0.005% compared with a 0.013% fall at this time last week. The slowing speed of decline has prompted hesitancy in financial markets, pushing the Euribor strip downwards. Further evidence of this impact comes from Portuguese bond yields, which today hit record Euro area highs. Spanish and Italian spreads have tightened this morning following market talk that the ECB were buying Spanish debt through the SMP in the belly of the curve. The Italian BOT auction this morning came in well-received following strong domestic demand, with 6-month yields falling from previous auctions.

He said, “Rising commodity prices, uncertainty in the Middle East, the spreading European debt crisis, increased frequency of “extreme weather events” and U.S. fiscal issues are “persistent” problems that will continue to spur market volatility and sway asset prices in the global economy. This is great news for gold. Goldman Sachs noted in a report on Jan. 13th that futures will advance to $1,940 an ounce in 12 months.  Morgan Stanley forecasts the yellow metal will climb to a record of $2,175 by 2013, said analysts Peter Richardson and Joel Crane in their research report.

It seems self-evident. The government can debase the currency and thereby be able to pay off its astronomical debt in cheaper dollars. But as I will explain below, things don’t work that way. In order to use the debasement of paper currencies to repay the debt more easily, governments will need to issue and use the gold bond. The paper currencies will not survive too much longer. Most governments now owe as much or more than the annual GDPs of their nations (typically far more, under GAAP accounting). But the total liabilities in the system are much larger. The US dollar game is a check-kiting scheme. The Fed issues the dollar, which is its liability. The Fed buys the US Treasury bond, which is the asset to balance the liability. The only problem is that the bonds are payable only in the central bank’s paper scrip! Meanwhile, per Bretton Woods, the rest of the world’s central banks use the dollar as if it were gold. It is their reserve asset, and they pyramid credit in their local currencies on top of it. It is not a bug, but a feature, that debt in this system must grow exponentially. There is no ultimate extinguisher of debt. In reality, stripped of the fancy nomenclature and the abstraction of a monetary system, the picture is as simple as it is bleak. Normally, people produce more than they consume. They save. A frontier farmer in the 19th century, for example, would dedicate some work to clearing a new field, or building a smokehouse, or putting a wall around a pasture so he could add to his herd. But for the past several decades, people have been tricked by distorted price signals (including bond prices, i.e. interest rates) into consuming more than they produce. In any case, it is not possible to save in an irredeemable paper currency.  Depositing money in a bank will just result in more buying of government bonds.  Capital accumulation has long since turned to capital decumulation... I propose a simple step. The government should sell gold bonds. By this, I do not mean gold “backed” paper bonds. I mean bonds denominated in ounces of gold, which pay their coupon in ounces of gold and pay the principal amount in ounces of gold. Below, I explain how this will solve the three problems I described above.

"Bernanke is betting the ranch on open-ended QE and zero interest rates and it worries me" is how Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley starts this must-see reality-check interview with Bloomberg TV's Tom Keene. The reason for his concern is simple, the current Fed modus operandi is a framework for rescuing economies in crisis but does little to sustain economic recovery. Roach agrees with Cal's Eichengreen that the European and US central banks are indeed in a policy trap, committed to a path of action that has to be perpetually ante'd up to maintain the dream. With Europe in recession already in his view, Roach does not expect the tough structural action until we see greater social unrest or overwhelming unemployment and reminds us of how close we got when Greece threatened the referendum in the late summer. He goes on to discuss China (positive on their efforts and 'solid strategy') and it's relative success as a regime which he contrasts with our "central bankers who pull the wool over our eyes with ZIRP and magical QE". Taking on the mistakes of Greenspan, letting capitalism go unchecked, and his incredulity at the 'glide-path' charts we were treated to yesterday by the Fed's bankers ('accountability'), Roach sees the painful process of deleveraging from excess debt, insufficient savings, and over-consumption as likely to take a long time as we should not assume investment will be the driver as Obama goes 'protectionist' (in the SOTU) on our 3rd largest export partner - yes, China.

For breathtakingly stupid political ideas and catastrophic “solutions” to America’s biggest problems, it’s hard to beat the New York Times op-ed page.  There, joined by such jihadists of the Left as Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, resides the peerlessly wrong-headed economist Paul Krugman, whose Nobel Prize was as well-deserved as the one Yasser Arafat received for helping to bring Peace to the world. Until yesterday, we might have thought Krugman had cornered the market for the absolute worst ideas on how to revive the economy.

GGP part deux, as the hopium high sold by US regulators that allowed banks and borrowers to pretend bad loans were good wears off and reality sets in..

Riskier assets advanced today, as market participants reacted to yesterday’s FOMC statement, as well as reports that Greece is making progress in talks for a debt-swap deal. However despite a solid performance by EU stocks, German Bunds remain in positive territory on the back of reports that the ECB has ruled out taking voluntary losses on its Greek bond holdings but is now debating how it would handle any forced losses and whether to explore legal options to avoid such a hit according to sources. As such, should talks between private creditors and other governing bodies stall again, there is a risk that Greece may not be able to meet its looming financial obligations. Of note, Portuguese/German government bond yield spreads continued to widen today, especially in the shorter end of the curve.

Gold rose 2.5% yesterday and broke $1,700/oz to $1,712.80, its biggest one-day gain in the past 4 months, as the US Federal Reserve’s 11 out of 17 members voted that interest rates would likely remain near zero into late 2014. Investors sought safe haven refuge into gold fearing their portfolios would lose value as Central Banks flood the markets with loose monetary policies and more cash for governments that can't seem to manage their balance sheets.  A group of 7 major economies now have interest rates that average .5%.  Silver also rallied up 4%.  Today's Comex February gold option expirations will show more activity in the gold markets. One trader stated that gold's gains on Wednesday could be due to a huge cover on a short position before today's option expiration.

As a reminder, the primary reason why the Greek PSI deal "officially" broke down last week, is because the European Fin Mins balked at the creditor group proposal of a 4%+ cash coupon. So now that creditor talks, which incidentally don't have a soft deadline so they can continue indefinitely, or until the money runs out on March 20, whichever comes first, have resumed we already are getting the first totally unsubstantiated "leaks" that negotiations are on the right path. As various US wires reported overnight, including DJ, BBG and Reuters, citing completely "unbiased" and "unconflicted" local Greek media, "Greece's private creditors are willing to improve their "final offer" of a four percent interest rate on new Greek bonds in order to clinch a deal in time to avert a messy default, Greek media said on Thursday without quoting any sources. With time running short ahead of a major bond redemption in March, private creditors are now considering an average coupon of around 3.75 percent on bonds they will receive in exchange for their existing investments, the newspapers wrote." All is good then: the hedge funds will make the proposal to Europe and Europe will accept, right? Wrong. "Another daily, Kerdos said participation of public sector creditors including the ECB in the swap deal was a pre-condition for that offer, which it said could bring the average interest rate to about 3.8 percent." And that as was reported yesterday is a non-starter. So in other words, the latest levitation in the EURUSD started at about 4am Eastern is nothing but yet another rumor-based attempt to ramp up risk. Only this time the rumor is actually quite senseless, which probably explains why even the market which has been completely irrational lately, has seen the EURUSD drop from overnight highs. That said, expect this rumor to be recirculated at least 5 more times before end of trading.

As we have pointed out previously, the primary if not only driver of relative risk returns (because in a world of relative fiat value destruction, it is all relative, except for gold which is revalued relative to all on a pro rata basis), will be who of the big two - the Fed and the ECB - can print more. And up until now, at least since the end of December when the market "suddenly" realized that the ECB's balance sheet has soared to unseen records, the consensus was that it was the ECB that would be the primary source of easing. Especially when considering that there is another ~€500 billion LTRO due on February 29. Yet today's rapid reversal in the EURUSD, driven by Bernanke's uber-dovish comments suggest that something has changed and that the Fed is now expected to ease substantially. How much? For that we look to the latest balance sheet cross-correlation, where if we go by simple correlation, the market is now pricing in (based on the EURUSD cross ratio) that the relationship of the two balance sheets will rise from a multi year low of 1.08 as of a few days ago to 1.15, at least based on the rapid move in the EURUSD higher as can be seen in the chart below. Indicatively, the actual value of the two balance sheets is €2.706 trillion for the ECB and $2.92 trillion for the Fed (or a 1.08 ratio). So now that the EURUSD has risen as high as it has, it implies that the pro forma "priced in" ratio is about 1.15. But wait: one should also factor in the fact that the ECB's balance sheet will rise by at least another €500 billion in just over a month, which will bring the ECB's balance sheet to €3.2 trillion. Which means that to retain the 1.15 cross balance sheet relationship, the Fed's own balance sheet will have to rise to $3,687 billion, or a whopping $767 billion increase!

Our discussions (here, here, and here) of the dispersion of deleveraging efforts across developed nations, from the McKinsey report last week, raised a number of questions on the timeliness of the deflationary deleveraging process. David Rosenberg, of Gluskin Sheff, notes that the multi-decade debt boom will take years to mean revert and agrees with our views that we are still in the early stages of the global deleveraging cycle. He adds that while many believe last year's extreme volatility was an aberration, he wonders if in fact the opposite is true and that what we saw in 2009-2010 - a double in the S&P 500 from the low to nearby high - was the aberration and market's demands for more and more QE/easing becomes the volatility-inducing swings of dysphoric reality mixed with euphoric money printing salvation. In his words, perhaps the entire three years of angst turned to euphoria turned to angst (and back to euphoria in the first three weeks of 2012?) is the new normal. After all we had angst from 1929 to 1932 then ebullience from 1933 to 1936 and then back to despair in 1937-1938. Without the central banks of the world constantly teasing markets with more and more liquidity, the new baseline normal is dramatically lower than many believe and as such the former's impacts will need to be greater and greater to maintain the mirage of the old normal.

Because live is better than dead. And just in case he lets one slip just what his price target for the Russell 2000 (aka the US GDP) is and how much gold the Fed will secretly lease. As a reminder, from Alan Greenspan testimony to Congress in July 1998: "Central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise."

Formal central bank independence is increasingly under pressure as societal preferences for a lender of last resort savior grow ever stronger (and more priced into nominal risk markets) as do demands for politicizing the monetary authorities under the pretext that they should more politically independent. Morgan Stanley takes on the question of constitutionality among the G3 Central Banks and rather unsurprisingly finds the mandates, targets, and prohibition treaties to be 'flexible' at best and 'practically meaningless' at worst. We-the-people appear to have little if any remit to constrain - even if our collective call for more printing leads to 'be careful what you wish for' reactions, as Michael Cembalest noted yesterday, "first prize in the Central Bank balance sheet expansion race is not necessarily one you want to win".