Bank of America

When it comes to Greece, and Europe in general, "hope" continues to remain the driving strategy. As Bloomberg's Richard Breslow summarizes this morning, "if you were looking for a word to describe the general feeling of equity markets today, you might well pick hopeful. U.S. equity futures opened higher and have been up all day. European bourses opened cautiously     higher as they await word, any word, from the European finance ministers or more importantly, Chancellor Merkel. Equity markets will continue to be very reactive to European headlines, but so far, no news has been taken as a reason for hope." Which incidentally, has been the general investment case for the past 6 years: "hope" that central banks know what they are doing.

The time to negotiate the Greek referendum this Sunday has come and gone and at this point, one can only sit and wait as the vote results start trickling in on Sunday evening. And, as Goldman's Huw Pill prudently observes, the outcome of Sunday's Greek referendum is uncertain. "Regardless of the outcome, Greece will continue to face substantial economic dislocation in the shorter term." What is interesting is that Goldman says "Greece will ultimately remain in the Euro area even in the event of a ‘No’ vote."

Buyout firms conducted 97 stock offerings in the second quarter, more than in any other three-month period. "It’s clear that we are currently in an environment of frothy valuations,” said Lise Buyer, founder of IPO advisory firm Class V Group. Her disturbing punchline: "The insiders - those with the most knowledge - are finding this a very good time to take some money off the table." In an echo of Leon Black, Frank Maturo, vice chairman of equity capital markets at UBS AG, said, “Private equity is selling everything that’s not bolted down."

It’s happening. As expected, dynastic politics is prevailing in campaign 2016. After a tease about as long as Hillary’s, Jeb Bush (aka Jeb!) officially announced his presidential bid last week. Ultimately, the two of them will fight it out for the White House, while the nation’s wealthiest influencers will back their ludicrously expensive gambit. And here’s a hint: don’t bet on Jeb not to make it through the Republican gauntlet of 12 candidates (so far). After all, the really big money’s behind him.

Presenting: Bank of America's chart showing who the undisputed victor in that age-old war between Wall Street and Main Street, truly is.

"Investors have experienced many mood swings, some institutionalized irrationality, as well as treacherous trading conditions in the first six months of 2015. The wacky has become the norm."

With a DoJ probe having predictably gone nowhere, a group of pensioners and retirement funds are suing Wall Street and Markit for colluding to monopolize the CDS market. Amusingly, Citadel has been subpoenaed to discuss how it was shut out of creating a CDS trading platform by the "oligopolistic" activities of TBTF banks, even as the firm looks set to dominate the market for IR swaps.

2/2 If more respected investors had warned about the market in ’07, we might have avoided the crisis in ’08.

— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) June 24, 2015

According to BofA's Jill Hall, "BofAML clients were big net sellers of US stocks in the amount of $4.1bn, following four weeks of net buying. Net sales were the largest since January 2008 and led by institutional clients—after three weeks of net buying, institutional clients’ net sales last week were the largest in our data history."

As we move toward the second half of 2015, signs of financial turmoil are appearing all over the globe. Slowly but surely, we are starting to see the smart money head for the exits. As one Swedish fund manager put it recently, everyone wants “to avoid being caught on the wrong side of markets once the herd realizes stocks are over-valued“.

Since the beginning of this year the markets have primarily treaded water. The primary support for the bulls has been continued acknowledgement by the Fed on an inability to remove accommodative policy by raising interest rates. (Which should make you question what happens the first time they do.) The bears have been feasting on weak economic data and deteriorating fundamentals.

There is hardly a better signal that inflection points in asset classes have been reached than major shifts in capital in/outflows. As a reminder, Bank of America has practically made a career of dragging out the old "great rotation" canard every time there has been a, well, great rotation, out of bonds and into stocks for the past 4 years... only to always top (and bottom) tick said capital flows. Overnight it did it again, when it reported that based on EPFR data, bond funds just suffered the biggest weekly outflow in 2 years of some $10.3 billion matched by a $10.8 billion inflow into stock funds: the largest since March.

With a small possibility that later today the Fed may hike rates for the first time in nearly a decade, and if not today then in 65 days (per the Bank of America countdown to the repeat of the "Ghost of 1937") at the September 17 meeting on which consensus has congregated as the historic rate hike day, there is one particular chart that if not readers, then certainly the Fed, should focus on: the near historic difference between the two primary inflation measures, core CPI and the Fed's preferred, core PCE which is now at the lowest level since the financial crisis.

"While most are focused on the risks around a withdrawal of liquidity, we believe the biggest hit to confidence could be the opposite: if another round of US QE is necessary to prop up the economy," BofAML says, suggesting the Fed is now cornered as raising rates risks destabilizing markets and QE4 risks betraying the futility of successive central bank interventions.