Merrill

Ever since Zero Hedge's advent just over two years ago, one of the most improper things we claimed happened routinely on Wall Street, was that the big banks' prop traders would consistently, and completely against regulations, populate their massive trading floors with both flow and prop traders, who often sat side by side, within earshot and front run the big clients' orders. Some may recall that point #8 of our follow up query to Goldman's Lucas van Praag in December 2009 was precisely a request to get the seating chart together with assigned responsibilities of all Goldman traders. To wit: "we are still hoping to get a seating chart of Goldman's trading floor (via legitimate channels) which clearly discloses flow and prop traders' seats in order to disclose to the general public that flow and prop traders do not share the same information flow, especially that emanating from core clients who tend to move markets the second they announce their trading axes to Goldman's flow traders." The reason we bring it up is that once again we seem to have been just a year ahead of the curve. In a just announced settlement, the SEC has fined Merrill, and supposedly its insolvent Bank of Calcutta taxpayer funded holdco, $10 million for doing precisely this! From Bloomberg: "The SEC found that Merrill operated a proprietary trading desk from 2003 to 2005 on the firm’s main equity-trading floor in New York, where market makers received and executed customer orders. While Merrill told clients their order information would be used on a need-to-know basis, proprietary traders got information and used it to place trades on Merrill’s behalf after executing the customer orders, according to the statement"...... So, does everyone finally understand how Goldman's (et al) prop group has no trading loss day (at near 50% margins) every single day year after year now?

As we are going through the excel sheets from the Fed dump, we will share our key findings. Keep in mind this is very raw data and will need far more processing before conclusions can be derived.

Merrill's Mary Ann Bartels looks at a slew of technicals today, and focuses on the most relevant one for the day: the EURUSD, although she focuses on the dollar basket DXY. According to her Fibonacci analysis, the EURUSD has a 50% retracement target of 81.49, which "would correlate to a move in the euro to 1.3124." As the EURUSD is trading inside of 1.31 now, this means that purely based on the EUR contribution to the DXY, there is a short-term arb opportunity of going long the DXY which is at 80.90 and selling the EURUSD. Then again, with a firesale in everything EUR related a short leg may not even be required, especially with complete lack of liquidity in the market, and a total lack of appreciation that the US will have to print far more before all this is over.

Too many buy orders will do that to even the best html code taxpayer money can buy. Contrarian indicator? In the meantime, US clients are advised to twiddle thumbs.

Earlier we disclosed market rumors that BofA/ML has raised PB margins. Bank of America has hit our tip box providing the following denial that PB margins have increased. We are happy that BofA/ML has seen it as sufficiently important to its business to refute rumors posted on a blog.

In response to earlier chatter this morning, please post the company statement below.  Please confirm receipt and call with any questions.
Thanks.

“Bank of America Merrill Lynch has not raised its prime brokerage margins in any product including equity, credit, rates, FX, etc.”

More market rumors of forced liquidations, this this coming from your favorite bailed out bank. If we get more we will post it.

It seems it was just yesterday that Bernanke was on the edge of committing perjury and lying that the Federal Reserve of New York knew nothing about Lehman's "more peculiar" off balance sheet transactions. Oh wait, it was: as a reminder in his cross by Scott Garrett, the New Jersey representative asked whether the "Fed was aware of the Repo 105 and the accounting irregularities going on?"
Bernanke answers "No - they were hidden." Oops. Because a story just released by the Financial Times seems to indicate otherwise, and unless Merrill Lynch is lying out of their derriere, Mr. Bernanke should be immediately investigated for potential perjury before the American people. "Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Reserve officials were warned by [Merrill Lynch] that Lehman Brothers was incorrectly calculating a key measure of its financial health months before its collapse in 2008...In the account given by the Merrill officials, the SEC, the lead
regulator, and the New York Federal Reserve were given warnings about
Lehman’s balance sheet calculations as far back as March 2008."  Amusingly, the sole purpose why Merrill would rat out Lehman is to make its own disastrous situation more agreeable, as often happens when the rats realize the sinking of the ship is inevitable. Well, unlike Merrill, whose liquidity situation was equally as disastrous on the weekend of September 14th, which found a pressed suitor in the form of BofA (and its Fed/Goldman-puppet CEO Ken Lewis), Lehman was not quite so lucky (one wonders why). Yet the bigger issue is why does the Fed keep on lying to the American public without any trace of consequence? When will someone finally wake up and sue the Federal Reserve (and we don't mean FOIA), or at least slap a racketeering lawsuit on "those people?" Oh yeah, the market is up, American Idol is on TV, G-Pap has done all that was needed to (not) be bailed out, so all shall be well. This is better known as "if the other Ponzi dude was thrown in jail, you must acquit" defense.

In the past Zero Hedge had respect for Ten. Senator Bob Corker due to his opposition to the nationalization of the bankrupt automakers and making them yet another ward of the ever larger central-planning state. However, after today's hearing with Paul Volcker on the Prop trading ban, any respect we may have had for the Senator has promptly dissipated. While we understand that the pointless bashing of Volcker's proposal by Corker was predicated by his sizable lobby interest (over $21 million raised in the course of his career) and his talking points were undoubtedly a transliteration of a memorandum submitted by one of the Too Big To Fail banks that stand to experience substantial losses should the Volcker proposal pass, one line of argument in Corker's speech that is flagrantly flawed was Corker's naive rhetorical question whether there has been a single instance during the financial crisis where a commercial bank engaging in proprietary trading led directly to that institution failing or having to be bailed out by the taxpayer. Corker assumed the answer is no and kept pouncing on that answer. Well, Senator, you are wrong - meet Merrill Lynch, incidentally one of your biggest financial backers. Also, please meet Merrill's prop basis trade and its prop HVOL4 trade, which combined were the primary reason for the firm's $15 billion writedown in Q4 of 2008 and the subsequent bail out of the firm by Bank of America.

Dear Judge Rakoff

In accordance with the Court's instruction, we respectfully submit this letter on behalf of Plaintiff Securities and Exchange Commission to seek leave, to file a Second Amended Complain. The SAC adds a count under Section 14(a) of the SEC Act of 1934, and Rule 14a-9 thereunder based on the failure of Bank of America Corporation to update the merger proxy statement, before the December 5, 2008 shareholder vote, concerning extraordinary losses that were sustained by Merrill Lynch & Co. prior to the vote

Merrill is convinced inflation is a-coming. As such, here are RateLab's proposed top trades, some of which are rather esoteric, others which make intuitive sense (of course, assuming one agrees that inflation trumps deflation: a bold assumption keeping in mind the endless consumer credit collapse). Some of the ideas: i) Sell OTM Payer Skews, ii) GNMA Reverse Mortgage Floaters, iii) Sell MBS/Buy Treasury Strips, iv) Buy CMBX 3 AAA /Sell CMBX 3 A, v) Buy FN 4.5/Sell half of FN 4 and 5 each, vi) Buy August 2025 vs USH0 Basis, and lastly some encouraging words on Agencies. As Zero Hedge is firmly convinced that the entire mortgage market is firmly gamed courtesy of endless Fed intervention which is the defacto buyer of first, middle and last resort, we urge readers to be very careful with any andall MBS/Agency trades.

The focus of Rosie's morning note has to do with debunking the latest misconception pushed by Barron's, which in all honesty is merely paraphrasing one of Rosie's own successors at Merrill Lynch - David Bianco, whose most recent fluff piece "Harvesting the Truth" (presented below) was an insult to thinking homo sapiens worldwide. The particular item that Rosie has beef with is the Bianco allegation that the consumer is not really 70% of US GDP. Here is Rosie's rebuttal.

"As I’ve said before, the significance of the government’s actions last fall cannot be overstated, and we are grateful. We believe those efforts were critical to protecting the financial system and ensuring the continued viability of the American economy." - Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

Thank you government indeed, because without you the "continued viability" of Goldman employees' bank accounts, who from 2000 to 2008, had an average compensation of $196,004, 145% more than the $79,962 peer average, may have well been in jeopardy. As it stands, 2009 will be the greatest pay year on record for Goldmanites, at an average $770,000 all in comp each

Merrill Lynch (excuse me, BofA/ML as they like to put on the lead left side of REIT prospectuses), presents its case for why optimism dominates and all theories voices by perma-bears "have little founding in economic theory or history." What is notable from the below multi-pronged perspective on the definition of the term "recession" is that BofA/ML's entire argument rests on the premise of a fiat currency as taken for granted. Eliminate that, and the construct of imminent recovery from any and every economic cataclysm becomes immediately flawed. Ironically, the only reason there is no mass violence and civil uprisings right now (which would have been the case had RBS and HBOS gone under, an event which according to Bloomberg was mere hours away), is because printing presses the world over went into overdrive with wanton monopoly money (or nightcrawlers as they have been penned elsewhere in the blogosphere) creation (or destruction, depending on your perspective).

Steve Sakwa, who we may have had some harsh words for in the past, primarily during his Merrill Lynch tenure, shares some perspectives on Commercial Real Estate. His observation:

"From a financing standpoint things are far worse; from a fundamental standpoint things are certainly getting worse."

REIT stocks benefited mightily from Merrill Lynch's generosity earlier in the year, when the ML REIT team issued follow on equity offerings, followed by prompt upgrades to the stock, although not necessarily in that order. The bottom line - roughly 5% in underwriter fees on almost $20 billion worth of new equity issued. And while last week's REIT massively downsized IPOs were an indication that the top for REIT stocks has come, that has not prevented Ken Lewis' firm from continuing to profit handsomely from the next shoe to drop in real estate.