Bank of America

At the end of October, as the Tristate Area was being flooded by Hurricane Sandy, one after another Wall Street firm tried to position Sandy virtually as a non-event, with total damage "forecasts" by such "reputable" firms as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America forecasting a total bill between $10 and $20 billion (as anything above that and the Q3 damage to GDP would be far more substantial than their recently bullish forecasts had accounted for, and would also imply a substantial spillover effect into Q1 2013), the same as various insurance companies who had other far more obvious reasons to undershoot on the total damages. We said the opposite, and based on historic damage forecasts, predicted the damage would likely be between $50 and $100 billion. Once again the sellside consensus was wrong and a fringe blog was accurate, as the CBO has just released the Obama administration's full aid request. Bottom line: $60.4 billion, or roughly what one year of what the ultimate tax hike compromise will bring into the government's treasury. Furthermore, if fully funded by debt today, this amount would send the US (which has a $57 billion debt buffer as of this moment) over the debt ceiling immediately.

Turkey’s trade balance may turn on whether President Barack Obama vetoes more stringent sanctions against Iran after the U.S. Senate passed a measure targeting loopholes in gold exports to the Islamic Republic. Turkey’s gold trade with neighbouring Iran has helped shrink its trade deficit over the past year according to Bloomberg. Incredibly, precious metals accounted for about half of the almost $21 billion decline. That’s calmed investor concern over its current-account gap, and helped persuade Fitch Ratings to give Turkey its first investment-grade rating since 1994.  The U.S. Senate voted 94-0 on Nov. 30 to approve new sanctions against Iran, closing gaps from previous measures, including trade in precious metals. Obama, who opposes the move on the grounds it may undercut existing efforts to rein in the nation’s nuclear ambitions, signed an executive order in July restricting gold payments to Iranian state institutions. Turkey exported $11.9 billion of gold in the first 10 months of the year, according to the Ankara-based statistics agency’s website. A very large 85% of the shipments went to Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Iran is buying the gold with payments Turkey makes for natural gas it purchases in liras, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan told a parliamentary committee in Ankara on Nov. 23.

Forget the perfectly anticipated Greek (selective) default. This is the real deal. The FT just released a blockbuster that Europe's most important and significant bank, Deutsche Bank, hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis, helping the bank avoid a government bail-out, according to three former bank employees who filed complaints to US regulators. US regulators, whose chief of enforcement currently was none other than the General Counsel of Deutsche Bank at the time!

Germany now has a formal working group assessing the cost of a Grexit.  Even large US-based multinationals are implementing contingency plans for a Grexit. The list includes JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Visa, PricewaterhoursCoopers, Boston Consulting Group, Juniper Networks, and others.

"After six years of declines, lending for so-called Helocs will rise 30 percent to $79.6 billion in 2012, the highest level since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, according to the economics research unit of Moody’s Corp. Originations next year will jump another 31 percent to $104 billion, it projected."

In the current Bernanke-Obama-Keynes toxic triangle (defined previously here) economy, blink too long and you will miss the latest bailout. While 4 years ago, it was America's M.A.D.-hostage taxpaying middle class that had no choice but to fund the trillions in direct Fed cash handouts and guarantees to bail out the banks, in the process saving and preserving the trillions in wealth for America's uber wealthy (the "1%") class, ever since then it has been the government's turn to rescue the country's lower and lower-middle classes (the "47%"), who, with no gun to their heads, decided to splurge during the height of the housing bubble (insurmountable mortgage payments and $0 down notwithstanding) and buy that aspirational McMansion that would make them so much more appealing in the eyes of the next door neighbor (who too could never afford their house in the first place). This has happened courtesy of a progressively more pervasive mortgage forgiveness plan, which has seen the total amount of debt funding a given home purchase shrink little by little each day. However, since there is no free lunch anywhere, certainly not when a bank's balance sheet is being impaired, like in 2008, someone is once again on the hook for this latest bailout. That someone, not surprisingly, is again America's middle class that lived within its means, that saved money while others splurged, and even put cash away for retirement, handing it over to various Pension investment vehicles.

Countless pages have been written about why Lehman caused the system to almost implode. However, the reality is that Lehman nearly took down the entire financial system for two reasons... and Spain will be far far worse.

This is what the most brand name US hedge funds bought and sold in the third quarter.

Now that The Show is over, we are left with the equivalent of a Sunday morning hangover following a binge of promises and lies. After the Supreme Court upheld the PPACA, a spate of mergers rippled through the managed health care realm, to ostensibly cope with smaller profit margins and  ‘compliance costs.’  But really, it’s because each firm wants to corner as much as possible of the market, in as many states as it can, to garner more premiums and control more disbursements and prices at the upcoming insurance ‘exchanges.’ Meanwhile the more hospitals are viewed as profit centers, the more their Chairmen will cut costs to maximize returns, and not care quality. They will seeks ways to sell underperforming assets, programs or services and reduce the number of nonessential employees, burdening those that remain. And if insurance companies can manage doctors directly, they can control not just costs, but treatment – our treatment. It’s not an imaginary government takeover anyone should fear; but a very real, here-and-now insurance company takeover, to which no one in Washington is paying attention.

Farce #1: “Market value” and “free markets” have become a joke.

Farce #2: Private, self-assigned, fake value is being traded for public money at 100 cents on the dollar.

Farce #3: Printed money is backed by nothing.

Farce #4: We have a “free” enterprise system dominated by monopolies that force people to buy inferior goods and services at exorbitant rates.

Farce #5: High-level financial crimes, no matter how egregious or widespread, are not being prosecuted.

Farce #6: Risk is gone. Now there is only liability borne by citizens.

Farce #7: Productivity has been supplanted by parasitism.

If you still listen to your Brand Name sell side broker, do you deserved to be Grouponed? Is the term muppet an attack or a description? 

Chairman of the LBMA David Gornall told the conference, “When comparing China to the U.S., it would seem that in China, gold asset allocation can only go in one direction.  The country has only 2% of its reserves in the form of gold compared with the U.S. at 75%.” The People’s Bank of China hasn’t disclosed any changes to its gold holdings since 2009, when it said they had risen a whopping 76% to 1,054 metric tons. While the U.S., Germany, Italy and France keep more than 70% of reserves in gold, China’s share is less than 2%. “Prices have recently been supported by official sector buying,” Gornall said today, without listing any central bank. “Will the gap between the amount of gold held in reserve by the developing markets and that of the developed world close?” Brazil, South Korea and Russia have all added gold reserves this year data from the International Monetary Fund show. Nations bought 254.2 tons in the first six months and may increase to 500 tons this year, the World Gold Council said in August, exceeding the 456 tons added in 2011. China has the world’s largest foreign-exchange reserves, totaling $3.29 trillion in September, according to data by Bloomberg.

Today doesn't matter. Tomorrow won't matter either. 

The saga of Rochdale, or the firm that is now officially Too Little To Fail, following its hilarious screw up in Apple trading as reported previously, when it got the size if not direction of AAPL stock post earnings wrong, and as a result the guy who otherwise would have had a massive X-mas bonus has been outed as a "rogue trader", is nearing its logical conclusion.

• ROCHDALE SAID TO BE IN ADVANCED RESCUE TALKS AFTER APPLE TRADES
  
• ROCHDALE SAID TO POTENTIALLY ANNOUNCE DEAL AS EARLY AS TODAY

What happens next? DBRS buys them for their strong integrity and work ethic? The NYT gets a licensing deal and makes Dick Bove into a political forecaster taking advantage of his infallible predictive Black Box (see his Bank of America reco rating below)? Inquiring minds want to know.

Back in the summer of 2010, when the SEC was still desperate to (laughably) scapegoat the May 6 Flash Crash on Waddell and Reed, in an attempt to telegraph to the public that it was in control of the HFT takeover of the stock market (an attempt which has since failed miserably as days in which there are no occult trading phenomena have become the outlier and have resulted in the wholesale dereliction of stock trading by retail investors), we first presented and endorsed the Nanex proposal that the flash crash was an "on demand" (either on purpose or by mistake) event, one which occurred as a result of massive quote stuffing which prevented regular way trading from occuring and resulting in a 1000 DJIA point plunge in minutes  (the audio track to which is still a must hear for anyone who harbor any doubt the market is "safe"). It turns out that in the nearly 3 years since that fateful market crash, not only has nothing been done to repair the market (ostensibly broken beyond repair and only another wholesale crash, this time without DKed trades, and bailed out banks, could possible do something to change the status quo) but the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that HFT algos launch, for whatever reason, have become a daily occurrence as the following demonstrations from Nanex confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt.