Lehman

Warren Buffett's “financial weapons of mass destruction” - how are you?

And to complete this morning's trifecta of disappointment, Business Inventories miss (for the 8th of the last 9 months) and show no change MoM - the weakest since May 2013. Building Materials, Furniture, and Autos saw inventories fall as Department Store inventories rose. Coupled with sales weakness (retail sales -0.9%), this is the highest inventory-to-sales ratio since Lehman... just as with Wholesale inventories...

Despite no help from USDJPY, credit, or bonds; US equity markets have algo-ised vertically since the US Open as investors machines BTFWRSSL (Buy The F###ing Worst Retail Sales Since Lehman). It appears investors are once again listening to a certain "world-renowned" talking head on CNBC. But we have seen this divergence before...

Earlier today we warned readers that based on actual credit card spending data, today's retail sales data would continue the worst trend since Lehman, and sure enough that's what happened: moments ago the Commerce department reported that in February, retail sales missed once again and missed big and across the board, the third big miss in a row, with the headline print coming at -0.6%, far below the 0.3% expected, and in line with the -0.8% drop last month. Putting the headline numbers in context: December -0.9%, January -0.8%, February -0.6%. Excluding the volatile autos and gas, sales dropped once again, sliding -0.2%, below the 0.3% expected - in fact below the lowest estimate - and worse even than last month's downward revised -0.1% decline. And with that the worst run in retail sales since Lehman is now in the record books.

February Import Prices to the US droped 9.4% YoY - the biggest drop since the month after Lehman's bankruptcy i 2008. January's drop was also revised lower. The YoY drop is dominated by a 43.2% drop in petroleum prices (but MoM in Feb petroleum prices jumped 8.1%). Ex-fuel, import prices fell 1.2% YoY as the price of imported capital goods fell the most since March 2009.

Yellen has created a narrative about the US economy, especially the (un)employment rate, and with the narrative is now firmly in place, Yellen and her stooges can claim they have no choice but to hike In short, Janet Yellen will go down into history as the person responsible for what may be the biggest economic crash ever, or at least delivering the final punch of the way into it, a crash that will make the rich banks even much richer. And there is not one iota of coincidence in there. Yellen works for those banks. The Fed only ever held investors’ hands because that worked out well for Wall Street. And now that’s over. Y’all are on the same side of the same trade, and there’s no profit for Wall Street that way.

After all 31 banks passed Dodd-Frank's "stress"-test with flying colors and awaited The Fed's CCAR blessing to spread the wealth to shareholders, we thought ironic that The Fed's Tarullo had previously commented that "we don't want banks to know the stress-test scenarios and tailor their portfolios to meet our goals," because that would never happen. The CCAR results are now out and 28 of 31 passed. Deutsche Bank, Santander failed for "qualitative" reasons (with significant and widespreasd deficiencies in risk management) and Bank of America will need to resubmit their proposal.

The entire formerly rich world is addicted to debt, and it is not capable of shaking that addiction. Not until the whole facade that was built to hide this addiction must and will come crashing down along with the corpus itself. Central banks are a huge part of keeping the disease going, instead of helping the patient quit and regain health, which arguably should be their function. In other words, central banks are not doctors, they’re crack dealers and faith healers. Why anyone would ever agree to that role for some of the world’s economically most powerful entities is a question that surely deserves and demands an answer.

For all the talk of a recovery, the recession may have quietly arrived as confirmed first by factory orders and now wholesale trade sales...

Doubting if the growth ahead of GM is now over, and the great post-bankruptcy "success story" is rapidly fading as the company has been pushed to resort to the kind of financial engineering which has pushed the S&P higher for all of 2014, and follows a record month of stock buyback announcements? Then doubt no more: moments ago GM announced it is authorizing an immediate $5 billion stock buyback, and plans to return all cash above a $20 billion floor to shareholders.

Austria’s decision to wind down Heta Asset Resolution AG sent ripples through the financial system, causing credit rating downgrades in Austria and bank losses in Germany: "It’s a mini-Greece going off in the heartlands of Europe." Here are some of the consequences, and delightful ironies, of a completely unexpected black swan landing in the south of Austria.

Something curious has emerged as a result of the divergent "Fed-vs-Everyone-Else" central bank policy: as JPM observed over the weekend while looking at the dollar fx basis, the dollar funding shortage is back with a vengeance, and is accelerating at pace not seen since the Lehman collapse.

"Secret" documents and power struggles aside, regulators are just as inept now as ever and bank stress tests are completely meaningless, as the Fed neither then, nor now, has any methodology for how to calculate capital in case of the same kind of counterparty failure chain as happened during Lehman, and when no amount of capital would have been sufficient to preserve the financial sector.

The US had a credit bubble, China has a credit bubble. The US had a housing bubble, China has a housing/investment bubble. Will China eventually have to go down the same path as the U.S., and the Eurozone? The answer: yes.