Consumer Prices

Because no discussion of global dollar pegs and entrenched FX regimes would be complete without mentioning the Hong Kong dollar...

On the heels of China's "failure" to send the PBoC to the rescue with an RRR cut over the weekend, battered EM assets were hit hard again on Monday as stocks, bonds, and currencies all went into panic mode as the global meltdown gathers pace.

US Consumer Prices (CPI) missed expectations MoM with a mere 0.1% rise (half the expected 0.2% rise). Core CPI (ex food and energy) rose just 0.1% - its weakest growth since Dec 2014 with the biggest drivers being a 5.6% plunge in airfares - the biggest drop since 1995 and a 0.3% surge in 'owner equivalent rents' driven by lodging. Gas prices rose for the 3rd consecutive month (unequivocally good?) but new and used car prices tumbled.

With China's currency devaluation having shifted to the backburner if only for the time being, all attention was once again on the Chinese stock market roller coaster, which did not disappoint: starting off with yesterday's dramatic 6.2% plunge, the Shanghai Composite crashed in early trading, plunging as much as 5% in early trading and bringing the two-day drop to a correction-inducing 11%, and just 51.2 points away from the July 8 low (when China unleashed the biggest ad hoc market bailout in capital markets history) . And then the cavalry came in, and virtually the entire afternoon session was one big BTFD orgy, leading to a 1.2% gain in the Shanghai Composite closing price, while Shenzhen and ChiNext closed up 2.2% and 2.7%, respectively.

It was a relatively quiet weekend out of China, where FX warfare has taken a back seat to evaluating the full damage from the Tianjin explosion which as we reported on Saturday has prompted the evacuation of a 3 km radius around the blast zone, and instead it was Japan that featured prominently in Sunday's headlines after its Q2 GDP tumbled by 1.6% (a number which would have been far worse had Japan used a correct deflator), and is now halfway to its fifth recession in the past 6 year, underscoring Abenomics complete success in desrtoying Japan's economy just to get a few rich people richer. Of course, economic disintegration is great news for stocks, and courtesy of the latest Yen collapse driven by the bad GDP data which has raised the likelihood of even more Japanese QE, the Nikkei closed 100 points, or 0.5% higher. 

While making its devaluation announcement, Beijing said that it wanted its currency "to reflect fundamentals" and to no longer simply mirror the movement of the dollar. It acknowledged the fact that its peg to the dollar was problematic and that it wanted a better, more natural mechanism. This is the key to understanding the announcement: The Chinese are preparing for a time in which the financial world does not spin in orbit around the dollar. Such a reality must make us think about the future.

Overnight the world realized that there is much more devaluation to come,  which in turn led to a tidal move higher in the EURUSD as the European banks who had been short the EURCNH (probably the same ones that were long the EURCHF in January ahead of the SNB shocker) continued covering their exposure, and in turn pushed the EURUSD well above 1.11, while the CHF continued to tumble alongside the USD at least when it comes to Europe. In Asia, and local emergin markets, however, it was a different FX story enitrely.

Despite claiming yesterday's devaluation was a "one-off", The PBOC has devalued the Yuan Fix dramatically for the 2nd day in a row - now 22 handles weaker than Monday's Fix. Offshore Yuan is trading at 4 year lows against the USD. The carnage from this dramatic shift is just beginning as global equity markets (US futures to China cash) are tumbling, US Treasury bond yields are crashing, gold is up, China credit risk is at 2 year highs, and China implied vol has exploded to 4 year highs. Ironically, China's government mouthpeiece Xinhua explains "China is not waging a currency war; merely fixing a discrepancy."

Here is an overview of next week's events and data placed in the larger context.  

If GDP growth only averages 2.0% in the Second Half (which I think is likely), then 2015 growth will only be about 1.7% annually. Given that the Fed didn't raise rates in 2012, 2013, and 2014, when growth was well north of 2%, why would they do so now? Yet Wall Street and the media stubbornly cling to the notion that 3% growth and rate hikes are just around the corner. Old notions die hard, and this one has taken on a life of its own.

We are delighted to report that about 7 years after it was glaringly obvious to everyone except the Fed of course, now - with the usual half decade delay - even the NY Fed has finally figured out what even 5 year olds get. "A new study from the New York Federal Reserve faults these policies for enabling college institutions to aggressively raise tuitions. The implication is the federal government is fueling a vicious cycle of higher prices and government aid that ultimately could cost taxpayers and price some Americans out of higher education, similar to what some economists contend happened with the housing bubble."

We have lived through a credit hyper-expansion for the record books, with an unprecedented generation of excess claims to underlying real wealth. In doing so we have created the largest financial departure from reality in human history. Bubbles are not new – humanity has experienced them periodically going all the way back to antiquity – but the novel aspect of this one, apart from its scale, is its occurrence at a point when we have reached or are reaching so many limits on a global scale. The retrenchment we are about to experience as this bubble bursts is also set to be unprecedented, given that the scale of a bust is predictably proportionate to the scale of the excesses during the boom that precedes it. Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing, meaning the downward spiral will continue for many years. China is the biggest domino about to fall, and from a great height as well, threatening to flatten everything in its path on the way down. This is the beginning of a New World Disorder…

Both bubbles (rents and housing) are vulnerable to popping. The real test of valuation is: what's it worth in a recession, after all the easy money and the jobs that depended on easy money have vanished?

If last week's shocking crash in the Employment Cost Index (ECI) to the smallest increase on record, was enough for some to seal the deal that the Fed will not hike rates for the balance of 2015 (and perhaps ever), here comes the Fed's unofficial mouthpiece, WSJ's Jon "Stingy Consumers" Hilsenrath, to debunk any such speculation with a note which likely came straight from the Fed titled the "Fed Doesn’t Demand Wage Growth Before Increasing Interest Rate."

You cannot understand gold if you think it goes up and down, that the dollar is the measure of gold. Gold does not necessarily go up with interest, inflation, or commodities. Indeed, it does not go anywhere. It's the dollar going places (mostly down).