New Normal

With all the recent chatter about an overhaul and dismantling of Too Big To Fail banks (spoiler alert: it will never happen, but it will take a lot of theater before that is made quite clear) many can be excused for believing the balance of power has shifted away from the megabanks (and their tens of trillions in over the counter derivative "weapons of mass financial destruction" so ably facilitating the Stockholm Syndrome of global mutual assured destruction with each passing day) and in the favor of the people, represented by the legislative and the judicial. Last night we got a quick reminder that absolutely nothing has changed in the true lay of the land, that the adjusted golden rule is still in place (yes, the banks still have all the gold and set all the rules), and that banks are still the undisputed rulers of the land when U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald agreed to dismiss claims that the 16 banks targeted by various LIBOR lawsuits broke federal antitrust laws. In so ruling, the potential cost to the banks from an adverse overall resolution would be crippled. The ruling also is likely to reduce the financial inventive for new plaintiffs to join investors, cities, lenders and other parties that have already filed lawsuits.  In brief, the banks won again just when it mattered, just when it seemed they may, for once, be on the defensive, and just when the concept of accountability and responsibility for years of conspiratorial and criminal collusion to manipulate a rate impacting hundreds of trillions of IR-sensitive instruments, was about to rear its ugly head. Because in the New Normal crime and punishment is simply a book by Dostoyevsky.

For the last year or so, Mario Draghi (the omnipotent head of the ECB) has discussed 'market fragmentation' as a major concern. The reason is clear - his easy money policies are entirely ineffectual in a monetary union when his actions do not 'leak' out to the real economy. Nowhere is this fragmentation more obvious than in the inexorable rise in peripheral lending rates (to small business) compared to the drop (over the last 18 months) in the core. Simply put, whether it is demand (balance sheet recessionary debt minimization) or supply (banks hoarding for safety), whatever the punch ladeled from the ECB's bowl, it is not helping the most needy economies. Of course, that was never really the point anyway - as we have pointed out many times; the actions of the ECB are (just as with the Fed) to enable the banking system to live long enough to somehow emerge from the black hole of loan losses and portfolio destruction that they heaped upon themselves. This chart is yet another example of proof that monetary policy is entirely ineffectual in the new normal - and yet the central planners push for moar...

• Lesson #1 Government agencies allocate capital better than the private sector
• Lesson #2 Central banks should control asset prices and prevent them from falling
• Lesson #3 Darwin & Schumpeter were wrong, creationists are right; there is such a thing as a free lunch
• Lesson #4 Towards a new orthopraxy
• Lesson #5 Wondrous tools used by the clergy to grow GDP
• Lesson #6 How to finance infinite needs

Tomorrow Cyprus banks will reopen sometime around noon (they are supposed to close at 6 pm but likely will close far earlier). What does that mean? Apparently nothing much. Because according ot various newswires the withdrawal limit at all banks will be €300 per day. In other words, all said "reopening" will do, is to allow physical branches to be used as glorified ATMs but with a very terrified and confused carbon-based teller on the other side (the same ATMs which a few days ago saw their limit reduced from €300 to €120). All other cash transactions will be strictly curbed, virtually no cash will be allowed to exit the island, and the what's more the government will ban the termination of the oh so ironically-named time deposits. This means that time deposits will now become "permanent deposits", even if within the €100,000 insured limit. The good news: credit card treansactions will be permitted when paying for goods and services anywhere on the island. Of course, electronic cash just happens to not be physical cash, which is why the bank is so cavalier with allowing people to access their own money. Well, electronic 1s and 0s-based money. In other words, tomorrow's bank reopening means absolutely nothing (as ATMs had worked for the duration of the Cyprus bail-in crisis), and anyone who had hoped they could just walk in and withdraw their entire insured deposit up to €100,000 will be severely disappointed. Of course, those who had more than €100,000: Poof, it's gone, step aside please.

Curious how in the New Normal a nation is brought to its untimely end without a single shot being fired? Dimos Dimosthenous, who has worked at the Bank of Cyprus for over 30 years, explains:

"That will be the end. Our jobs, our rights, our welfare funds will be lost and Cyprus will be destroyed."

In short: not with a bang, but a bailout.

Barclays index of high yield bond total returns is now 63% higher that its pre-crisis peak. This compares to an equivalent total return index for the S&P 500 was only 12% (and it has yet to break the October 2007 highs). These numbers are astronomical in the face of micro- and macro-fundamentals and while equity markets remain the policy tool du jour for the central planning elite, it appears they are perhaps starting to become a little concerned that driving all the retiring boomers 'safe' money into risky bets may not end so well. Just as Alan Greenspan stepped on the throat of equity markets with his now infamous 'irrational exuberance' speech, we wonder, as Bloomberg notes, if last night's speech to the Economic Club of New York by Bill Dudley is the new normal equivalent, as he noted, "some areas of fixed income - notably high-yield and leveraged loans - do seem somewhat frothy," just as we warned here. With the high-yield index trading at 5.56% yield - the lowest in over 25 years and loans bid at 98.27 (the highest since July 2007), perhaps he is right to note, "we will need to keep a close eye on financial asset prices."

The growing debacle that is the US student loan bubble - nearly the same size and severity as the Subprime crisis at its peak- has been painfully dissected on these pages in the past, so at this point the only thing remaining is to keep track of the bubble growing exponentially in real time as it hits all time records, and eventually pops. Helping us to track the realtime growth is the latest data from Equifax, via Reuters, which confirms what everyone knows: things in student bubble land are getting worse by the minute. Much worse, because in just the first two months of 2013, banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow U.S. economic recover.

After the strongest 4-day surge in 11 months, it would appear that the BoJ is on full-court-press tonight to jawbone the world back to the new normal. The sad truth is though, they can't even make up their own punchlines anymore:

*KURODA: BOJ WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO END DEFLATION.

Well, why not, it worked for Draghi for a few months? Of course JPY is leaking back lower a little as they talk up their devaluation strategy (and all their various shiny new options - that have never been tried before) - even as: *KURODA: UNCERTAINTIES ARE HIGH FOR JAPAN'S ECONOMY. Between Dijsselbloem's slip of truth (and rapid retraction) and now this 'copycat-ism' by a desparate BoJ, it appears, simply put, we are being taken for fools.

Yesterday, we first reported on something very disturbing (at least to Cyprus' citizens): despite the closed banks (which will mostly reopen tomorrow, while the two biggest soon to be liquidated banks Laiki and BoC will be shuttered until Thursday) and the capital controls, the local financial system has been leaking cash. Lots and lots of cash. Alas, we did not have much granularity or details on who or where these illegal transfers were conducted with. Today, courtesy of a follow up by Reuters, we do.  As it turns out, the Russian oligrachs this whole operation was geared to punish, may have used the one week hiatus period of total chaos in the banking system to transfer the bulk of the cash they had deposited with one of the two main Cypriot banks, in the process making the whole punitive point of collapsing the Cyprus financial system entirely moot.

In the aftermath of this weekend's earth-shattering developments out of Cyprus, in which countless people lost billions in savings, having forgotten their money is nothing more (or less) than a general unsecured liability of an insolvent banking sector which in the absence of the Bernanke and Draghi moral hazard-put are simply easy confiscation targets, it is difficult to conceive that having a massive surplus of deposits was actually a good thing. Ironically, this was precisely the case as recently as 10 months ago, as this May 2012 presentation from the Bank of Cyprus titled "International Banking Services: Strategic Business Crossroad - A Reliable Financial Center" (don't laugh) makes all too clear.

While Friday's 'hope' triggered some selling pressure in Bitcoin (in EUR), it appears the dismal reality of Europe's new normal has spurred a 'great rotation' as BTC just hit EUR60 for the first time ever...(from EUR36 before the initial Cyprus news last week).

Back in August 2011, one of the most prescient European (ex) central bankers, Cyprus' very own Athanasios Orphanides was optimistic, but with a caveat: "I am optimistic that with the right actions and effort by all we will pull through this," Orphanides told reporters after a meeting with Finance Minister Kikis Kazamias. They were Orphanides' first public comments since warning authorities in a July 18, 2011 letter that Cyprus ran the risk of requiring an EU bailout unless urgent action was taken to shore up its finances." Two years later, following endless dithering and pretense that just because the ECB has stabilized the markets, all is well, and "action was being taken" when none was, Cyprus is beyond the bailout stage - it is now quite literally on the verge of total collapse. This is also why Orphanides, who recently quit as Central Banker of Cyprus following a clash with the new communist government (and was replaced by a guy named Panicos), no longer is optimistic. "The European project is crashing to earth,” Athanasios Orphanides told the Financial Times in an interview. "This is a fundamental change in the dynamics of Europe towards disintegration and I don’t see how this can be reversed.”

I think Bernanke is telling the greatest lie ever told.

It was a dream come true new normal FOMC day - green all around as the overnight pump on Russian hope provided the anchor. US equities (except Transports which were hammered by FDX) wiggled sideways around unchanged from pre-Cyprus, ignored the Fed, jumped on the BoJ non-news, ran some stops into the close, and then gave back all the open-to-close gains as JBL and ORCL missed and reality sunk in. Post-Cyprus, Morgan Stanley remains -4% (and BofA +2%) but homebuilders led the way. Volume was average; average trade size was low (and has been falling). For most of the day Treasury yields (+5bps on the day), S&P 500 futures (+6pts), and EURJPY were inseparable as algos ruled the VWAP waves. The S&P 500 ends below pre-FOMC levels but Oil was among the biggest post-FOMC gainer.

We are lucky that in the new normal earnings, cash flows, news, and broadly reality, are completely irrelevant, and all that matters is the central bank-sponsored S&P multiple expansion (due to monetary dilution), or else the news from moments ago that FedEx once more cut not only its EPS but CapEx (and thus growth spending) may have been negative for stocks, and even mentioned by assorted propaganda networks. And since none of the above will happen, here is the bottom line: FedEx - the bellwether for global trade and logistics - just cut its year EPS from $6.20-$6.60 to $6.00-$6.20, and slashed CapEx from $3.9 billion to $3.6 billion. But at least in keeping with the demands of ZIRP, the company instead of spending on growth, which is obviosuly not there, will instead buy back 10 million shares of stock. This tells you all you need to know about the "recovery."