Reality

In keeping with the tradition of waking up to reality with a several month delay on downgrades (if being the first to upgrade insolvent Eurozone members), here comes Fitch, to boldly go where Moody's went long ago.

• UNITED KINGDOM L-T IDR OUTLOOK TO NEGATIVE FROM STABLE BY FITCH
• FITCH AFFS UNITED KINGDOM AT 'AAA'; REVISES OUTLOOK TO NEGATIVE

As a reminder, UK consolidated debt/GDP is... oh... ~1000%

While WTI hovers around $105.5 (slightly underperforming USD strength), Brent has notably outperformed with the Brent-WTI spread now edging towards $20 (from under $15 two weeks ago). Given the increasing tension, we thought it useful to get a grasp of just what an oil-supply shock means. BNP points out that in all but one of the historical oil price shocks of the last 40 years, equities have notably underperformed oil (understandably) but the higher the oil price rise, the higher the chance of negative absolute returns for stocks. We also note that oil prices tend to rise in anticipation of the crisis and then explode (so arguing that we are discounting an event is proved moot) and the impact (in lost supply) from closing the Straits of Hormuz is an order of magnitude larger than the next five largest events. Regionally, positioning favors the middle-eastern oil producers obviously with Asian EM nations set to suffer dramatically worse than DMs.

Something funny happened on the road to a "fixed" Europe....

Only in a debt-based money system could debt be curiously cast as an asset. We’ve made “extend and pretend” a quaint phrase for a burgeoning market for financial lying and profiteering aimed toward preventing the collapse of a debt- (or lack-) based system that was already doomed by its initial design to collapse. This primer will detail the major components and basic evolution of fake wealth creation, accelerating debt expansion, hollowing out of the economy, and inevitable financial implosion.

The storm clouds gathering behind Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs, are a perfect analogy for his fascinating treatise on the key to long term bull markets and why the Dow could get cut in half. Bringing together the critical fundamental driver of P/E multiples - income growth in his view - and the historically most critical secular shift of this fundamental driver - communications breakthroughs, Biderman remains calm (for once) in his explanation for why the current low levels of income growth mean that should a new reality of less Fed exuberance (or a belief in less Fed exuberance) occur, the Dow will go to 6000 as he sees little evidence of technological innovations of the scale needed to lead the next 25 years secular bull market.

In the Spring of 2011, when Libyan oil production -- over 1 million barrels a day (mpd) -- was suddenly taken offline, the world received its first real-time test of the global pricing system for oil since the crash lows of 2009. Oil prices, already at the $85 level for WTIC, bolted above $100, and eventually hit a high near $115 over the following two months. More importantly, however, is that -- save for a brief eight week period in the autumn -- oil prices have stubbornly remained over the $85 pre-Libya level ever since. Even as the debt crisis in Europe has flared. As usual, the mainstream view on the world’s ability to make up for the loss has been wrong. How could the removal of “only” 1.3% of total global production affect the oil price in any prolonged way?, was the universal view of “experts.” Answering that question requires that we modernize, effectively, our understanding of how oil's numerous price discovery mechanisms now operate. The past decade has seen a number of enormous shifts, not only in supply and demand, but in market perceptions about spare capacity. All these were very much at play last year. And, they are at play right now as oil prices rise once again as the global economy tries to strengthen.

I just finished reading the best-selling Coming Apart by Charles Murray. I confess to not having heard of the book until I saw it in the store, but the cover of a champagne glass and a crumbled beer can instantly suggested to me that I was going to enjoy this new examination of the United States and its sociological disintegration of the past half-century.

Today, almost every financial journalist that is published in the mainstream media prefers to be steered by their controlling interests into being a “cleaner”, scrubbing clean the facts and hard evidence of every financial crime scene and of inherent risks that lurk everywhere, and instead, opting to present a rosy, unrealistic, fantasy outlook of stock markets and the global economy.

While the recent employment report will most assuredly give the current Administration plenty to boast about the underlying trends are far more disturbing.   The ongoing structural realities, the fact that many of the jobs that have been destroyed will never return, combined with the demographic shift make the headline number much less important compared with the emerging trends.  Take a look at a recent Gallup Organization poll which polls weekly, rather than one week out of a month with BLS, in regards to the emerging trends of employment.  The most recent poll update shows the trend of the percentage of unemployed rising.   As you can see the Gallup survey tends to lead movements in the BLS poll by about 4 weeks or so.   Therefore, it is highly likely that in the coming month as the massive seasonal adjustments in January and February fade out we will see the unemployment rate rise back towards 8.5%. 

Folks, this is a DE-pression. And those who claim we’ve turned a corner are going by “adjusted” AKA “massaged” data. The actual data (which is provided by the Federal Reserve and Federal Government by the way) does not support these claims at all. In fact, if anything they prove we’ve wasted money by not permitted the proper debt restructuring/ cleaning of house needed in the financial system.

What is fraud except creating “value” from nothing and passing it off as something? Frauds interlink and grow upon each other. Our debt-based money system serves as the fraud foundation. In our debt-based money system, debt must grow in order to create money. Therefore, there is no way to pay off aggregate debt with available money. More money must be lent into the system to make the payments for old debts. This causes overall debt to expand as new money for actual people (vs. banks) always arrives at interest and compounds exponentially. This process is called financialization. Financialization: The process of making money from nothing in which debt (i.e. poverty, lack) is paradoxically considered an asset (i.e. wealth, gain). In current financialized economies “wealth expansion” comes from the parasitic taxation of productivity in the form of interest on fiat lending. This interest over time consumes a greater and greater share of resources, assets, labor, and livelihood until nothing is left.

While 'good is good, and bad is better'-market continues to price a higher and higher strike price for Ben, Mario, and Xiaouchuan, the twin (d)evils of energy and food price inflation could be tamping their enthusiasm for their new-found experiment. Critically, for all those 'hoping' for the pump to be primed and a self-sustaining recovery to take hold, we present three charts to rain on that parade. Whether the world's central bankers come back to the table is unclear, given their clear concerns at what they have done recently, but we suspect this is much more a 'when' than 'if' question and given the performance of asset and volatility markets, it seems this is more than priced in.

As VIX drops below 15 for the first time in almost a year, the clarion calls of 'all-clear' should perhaps be tempered with the record-steepness of the volatility term-structure. Simply put, everyone and his mom is now selling short-dated vol but mid-term vol remains stubbornly high - in English, we're safe today but tomorrow could be a disaster - or given medium-term risk outlooks, short-term traders are the most complacent they have ever been.

Many lessons are available to learn from the Greek debt crisis. Several more are probably to come as the intended and unintended consequences of what the Europeans have done begin to infect the bond markets. I point this morning to the vast differences now between the ownership of American debt and European debt and, as the immediate effects of the LTRO begin to wear off, several dawning realizations that I think will cause European debt to gap out against American debt regardless of the yields of Treasuries.  

Since the much-heralded 3Y LTRO program was envisioned and enacted, we have been clear in our perspective that while this appears to have signaled a removal of downside (contagion-driven) tail-risk for banks (and implicitly to sovereigns), the market's perceptions are once again short-termist. Missing the 'unintended-consequence' for the 'sugar high' is the forest-and-trees analogy that we have seen again and again for the past few years but we worry that this time, given the sheer size of the program, that the ECB has got a little over its skis. By demanding collateral for their bottomless pit of low-interest loans, the ECB has not only reduced banks' necessary deleveraging needs (and/or capital raising) but has increased risk for all bond-holders (and implicitly equity holders, who are the lowest of the low in the capital structure remember) as the assets underlying the value of bank balance sheets are now increasingly encumbered to the ECB. Post LTRO, Barclays notes that several banking-systems (PIIGS) now have encumbered over 15% of their balance sheets but LTRO merely extends a broader trend among European banks (pledging collateral in return for funding) and on average (even excluding LTRO) 21% of European bank assets are now encumbered, and therefore unavailable for unsecured bond holders, ranging from over 50% at Danske (more a business model choice with covered bonds) to around 1% for Standard Chartered. As the liquidity-fueled euphoria starts to be unwound, perhaps this list of likely stigmatized banks is the place to look for higher beta exposure to the downside (especially as we see ECB margin calls start to pick up).