goldman sachs

During Monday's flash crashing mayhem, the fragility of the ETF pricing system was exposed for all to see. While common sense dictates that the extreme market moves, trading halts, and tripped circuit breakers may have had quite a lot to do with the epic divergences between NAV and unit pricing, the real culprit was a "computer glitch" caused by a botched "systems change" last Saturday. The fact that the trouble calculating NAVs across nearly 800 mutual funds happened on the very same day as the flash crash is strictly coincidence. 

China has been the epicenter of recent market concerns as global markets focus on China's growth trajectory. Equity markets have been hit hard but the question is - how much further is there to go before it's over? Goldman Sachs looks at what the options market telling us? With HSCEI implied volatility over 40, a significant term structure inversion, and high skew, Goldman warns options all signal caution ahead.

In the past week, ever since the Fed's FOMC minutes which sent the S&P tumbling from 2100 to their lows in the overnight session, some 13% lower, the US economy underwent the functional equivalent of a 15 bps rate hike, or more than half the rate hike that the Fed has been so terrified to engage in for years.

This time, it really is different. It's "Structural", not "Cyclical". It's actually a very big difference, and banking will never be the same.

Not only is the equity market going to crash (after a dead cat bounce) the property market is about to pass out pain like you won't believe.

While the western mainstream media meme is that "this is all China's fault" - despite the fact that the real break happened after the FOMC Minutes last week - Xinhua reports that China central bank blames wide-spread expectations of a Fed rate hike in September for the global market rout... demanding The Fed "remain patient."

While the "hedge fund" hotel strategy works on the way up, when everyone makes roughly the same profits, it is on the way down when these hedge fund hotels become "Hotel California" - hedge funds can check out, and sometimes they can even leave... with massive losses. According to a Bloomberg analysis, many of these hedge fund hotel stocks, or companies where hedge funds hold a combined stake of at least 25%, suffered declines of as much as 42 percent in the recent stock market rout.

Yesterday's market tumble finally brought the S&P and Nasdaq alongside the Dow Jones into correction territory, send the broader index down 11% from its highs, even as a vast majority of S&P constituents already preceded the index and are either in correction or in bear market territory. And yet, following today's latest central bank intervention, this time in the long overdue Chinese interest rate cut (which will hardly have a lasting impact on either the economy or stock markets), the S&P correction may may prove to be short lived: S&P is poised to open about 4% higher, delivering the latest "Bullard" moment to the S&P, this time courtesy of China. Still, the question remains: was that it for the long overdue correction, and what comes next.

Last week, in the global currency war’s latest escalation, Kazakhstan instituted a free float for the tenge causing the currency to immediately plunge by some 25%. The rationale behind the move was clear enough. What might not be as clear is how recent events in developing economy FX markets stem from a seismic shift we began discussing late last year - namely, the death of the petrodollar system which has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance and was, until recently, a fixture of the post-war global economic order.

The eventual outcome to all this is captured brilliantly in this quote by Ludwig Von Mises, the Austrian economist: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." The credit expansion happened between 1980 and 2008, there was a warning shot which was soundly ignored by ignorant central bankers, and now we have more, not less, debt with which to contend.

The following story is guaranteed to make you sick. Once again, we’re shown that following trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts and backstops, TBTF Wall Street banks immediately went ahead and focused all their attention obtaining loopholes in order to transfer risk and make billions upon billions of dollars in the financial matrix, as opposed to adding any benefit whatsoever to society.

While some, perhaps not California farmers, will disagree with NOAA's assessment of the world's atmospheric conditions, earlier today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that July was the warmest month ever recorded for the globe and was also the record warmest for global oceans, putting a full stop to a year that has been characterized by numerous perplexing atmospheric outliers around the globe but perhaps none other more so than NOAA's earlier assessment that the winter of 2015 was also the warmest on record despite the much discussed US winter, where for the second year in a row the economic slowdown was blamed on a colder than usual winter. Go figure: perhaps here too we need double seasonal adjustments.

• $1 trillion in Emerging Market outflows in the past 13 months (FT)
• German lawmakers back third Greek bailout (Reuters)
• Dutch government faces test in "junkie" Greece debate (Reuters)
• China c.bank offers selected banks medium term lending facility (Reuters)
• Another "expert network" busted: Promontory settles over StanChart probe (FT)
• Angola to Ship Most Crude in Four Years to Meet Asian Demand (BBG)
• Hackers dump data online from cheating website Ashley Madison (Reuters)
• Yuan’s Devaluation Brings Losses for Some (WSJ)

The robo machines pushed their snouts through 2100 on the S&P index again yesterday. This was the 13th time since, well, February 13th that this line has been re-penetrated from below. But don’t call it an omen of bad luck; its more like monetary rigor mortis. The bull market is dead, but the robo-machines and talking heads of bubble vision just don’t know it yet.

"The Goldman blowback is a particularly challenging subject to understand and analyze. Taken to extremes, criticism of the firm, which was founded and built by Jewish Americans, smacks at times of anti-Semitism. Fed officials don’t want to fall into the trap of ostracizing qualified people merely because of their association with the firm or its Jewish roots."

- John Hilsenrath