Monetization

Last night, Japan issued an update of its total public debt. The number was ¥983 as of September 30. Trillion. The bad news is that the long anticipated currency legend which will finally say "¥ in Quadrillions" is once more delayed. The good news, is that with the recently expanded BOJ QE8 and QE9, the excess monetization debt capacity, a lot of its going to sweep the aftermath of Fukushima under the rug, will promptly be filled, and we fully expect the December 31, 2012 debt update to finally bring us to the first instance of the word "quadrillion" used in the context of a modern, developed nation.

The Status Quo won--no surprise there, as there was no other choice offered. The Imperial Presidency won, too, of course; anyone anywhere can still be assassinated by order of the Imperial President, regardless of their citizenship. Anyone can be labeled "an enemy of the State" and either liquidated (high fives all around!) or crushed by the Espionage Act (transparency is a crime), Patriot Act (dissent is also criminal), the NDAA, or maybe another Executive Order. The neofeudal Aristocracy also won, as vested interests were free to buy "free speech" in unlimited quantities. That means the bag of tricks to "save us from recession" is finally empty. The next recession will sink its teeth into the Savior State and all the protected fiefdoms and cartels with a vengeance built up by four years of "extend and pretend." The failure of "extend and pretend" and the Status Quo that sold it as the "fix" opens up the possibility that crisis will lead to real reform, the kind that requires a Constitutional Convention.

What a roundtrip! After starting off November with a bang, and after nearly retracing all October losses in the aftermath of the NFP headfake in less than 2 trading sessions, the S&P futures literally imploded, and dropped 23 points from the intraday high, the same distance traveled as it crossed yesterday, only to the downside and on very strong volume for the second day in a row. While the 1400 support in ES is once again in play (ES closed literally on the lows of the session at 1405.5), as we suggested earlier, the far more ominous news is that the AAPL bubble appears to have popped (but, but, it is so cheap on forward multiple basis: guess what - forward multiples are based on forward earnings, which may very well never materialize! and thanks to the dividend, not even AAPL's cash hoard is the bastion it one was) and is now close to entering bear market territory, down just shy of 20% from its all time highs of $705.07 hit on September 12. Now with the 200 DMA taken out, the next support is the 20% retracement from the high which is at $564. After that it is freefall for a long time as a very deep gap needs filling. It is unclear just how much of the selling was there to cause max pain for Dick Bove and Rochdale, for whom every tick lower in the stock means a bigger margin call.Finally, news hitting literally seconds ago that MSFT may be launching its own phone if its partner strategy falters, means there go even more margins.

So with world central banks printing paper money day and night it is no surprise that Gold is now emerging as the ultimate currency: one that cannot be printed. Indeed, Gold has broken out against ALL major world currencies in the last ten years. The below chart prices Gold in Dollars (Gold), Euros (Blue), Japanese Yen (Red) and Swiss Francs (Purple):

"The sale of Treasury securities that was tentatively scheduled for today, Monday, October 29, will take place as scheduled, with a 10:15 AM open and 11:00 AM close.  However, settlement will take place on Wednesday, October 31, not Tuesday, October 30.  The purchase of Treasury securities previously scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday, October 30, has been postponed, and the schedule of Treasury security operations will be updated in the coming days with details of the rescheduled operation.  After today's sale, Treasury purchase and sale operations are anticipated to resume on Wednesday, October 31.  Similarly, there will be no agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) trading on Tuesday, October 30.  MBS trading operations are anticipated to resume on Wednesday, October 31."

Two of the saving features that allowed Japan to internalize 30-some years of failed fiscal and monetary policy (and yes, not one, not two, but now 8 failed iterations of quantitative easing) and to offset one relentless deflationary vortex was i) its demographics coupled with an investing culture that favors deposits and bonds over equities, which incentivized its aging population to invest its savings into government bonds, and ii) its trade surplus which led to foreign capital flows to enter the country. Well, as far as i) is concerned, Japan may have reached its demographic limit, since as reported several months ago, Japan's pension funds are now not only selling JGBs to meet redemption and cash needs, but forced to do truly stupid things like investing in the riskiest of assets to generate a return at any cost. In other words, demographics will no longer be a natural source of demand for deficit funds. As for ii), well... here is what has happened with Japan's trade surplus status in recent weeks following the collapse in the country's foreign relationship with China.

There is a possibility that the realm of monetary policy could increasingly merge with that of fiscal policy and national debt management policy. Globally, UBS believes, central banks are edging down monetary policy paths that can be viewed as increasingly backstopping budget deficits as lawmakers of respective governments continue to fail to make progress toward fiscal consolidation. As we have vociferously stated, a progression down this road could lead to many unsavoury outcomes, as fiscal and monetary policies entwine themselves in an increasingly negative dynamic -  coining the term “Fonetary-policy” – fiscal policy plus monetary policy.

"We have just spent 15 years learning that a policy of creating asset bubbles is a bad idea, so it is hard to imagine why the Fed wants to create another one. But perhaps the more basic question is: How fruitful is the wealth effect? Is the additional spending that these volatile paper profits are intended to induce overwhelmed by the lost consumption of the many savers who are deprived of steady, recurring interest income? We have asked several well-known economists who publicly support the Fed’s policy and found that they don’t have good answers. If Chairman Bernanke is setting distant and hard-to-achieve benchmarks for when he would reverse course, it is possibly because he understands that it may never come to that. Sooner or later, we will enter another recession. It could come from normal cyclicality, or it could come from an exogenous shock. Either way, when it comes, it is very likely we will enter it prior to the Fed having ‘normalized’ monetary policy, and we’ll have a large fiscal deficit to boot. What tools will the Fed and the Congress have at that point? If the Fed is willing to deploy this new set of desperate measures in these frustrating, but non-desperate times, what will it do then? We don’t know, but a large allocation to gold still seems like a very good idea."

Hugh Hendry: "I have resigned from the professional undertaking of coin flipping. I am not here to tell you where gold’s going to be. I have no idea. That’s my existentialism. I am a student of uncertainty, I have no idea where the stock market is going to be. So when I am creating trades in my portfolio for my clients, I am agnostic. I just want to enhance the probability that I make money come what may."

By now everyone knows that as part of QEternity, Uncle Ben is currently monetizing $40 billion in MBS per month, a number which as we first forecast hours after its announcement and which everyone is now piling on to reaffirm, will rise to $85 billion in outright, unsterilized monetization beginning January 1, 2013 (as anything less would be seen as impllicit tightening in a market which now needs $85 billion in Fed Flow monthly simply not to collapse). This is fungible money which is going solely to benefit the banks, whose reserves with the Fed swell, and which proceeds can be used for virtually any purpose - from buying MBS (which they are doing) to 300x P/E stocks like AMZN - but not to be lent out to those desperately seeking loans? Why: one simple reason - the banks are already mired in legacy litigation from loans made during the last housing bubble (just see the hundreds of mortgage-related lawsuits Bank of Countrywide Lynch is a defendant in and you will get a sense of how bad it is) and the last thing they need is a repeat of that. And while the Fed has only one monetary easing pathway, which always goes through the banks, we wish to demonstrate to our readers what, in a thought experiment ignoring all the obvious practical considerations, the equivalent benefit to the general population would be if instead of being held by the banks and used to make the rich even richer, this money would bypass the banking syndicate and go straight to the US job seeker...

• China May Forgo Easing as Economy Rebounds, Survey Shows (Bloomberg)... or as food and house inflation has never gone away
• China Edges Out U.S. as Top Foreign-Investment Draw Amid World Decline (WSJ)
• Fed to keep buying bonds despite firmer U.S. growth (Reuters)
• Bernanke Seen Attacking Jobless Rate With QE Until His Term Ends (Bloomberg)
• Mortgage applications plunge 12%, down for third week in a row (Dow Jones)
• Exchanges Retreat on Trading Tools - Fund Managers, Regulators Say Certain Orders Are Risky, Aid High-Speed Firms (WSJ)
• Europe Bank Chief to Defend Bond-Buying Plan (WSJ)
• Japan, China Envoys Met Last Week for Talks on Island Feud (Bloomberg)
• Goldman’s Pill Says ‘Guerrilla’ ECB to Impose Losses on Skeptics (BBG)
• Chance rise of an Obama defeat (FT)
• King Says BOE Is Ready to Add to QE If U.K. Recovery Fades (Bloomberg)
• Rajoy Sees Case for Slowing Spain’s Austerity as Economy Shrinks (BusinessWeek)
• Hong Kong Intervenes to Defend Peg as Upper Limit Tested (Bloomberg)

There were two major datapoints overnight: the first one came out early in the session, when the Chinese Flash HSBC PMI (not the official one), printed in contraction territory for a 12th consecutive month but jumped sufficiently to 3 month highs to give the algobots hope that China may be turning (it isn't: China, like the US has a major political event early November and all its data is more manipulated than ever). Regardless, this sent future rising to session highs until virtually yesterday's entire gap down was eliminated. The euphoria continued until several hours later we got composite European (as well as the most important German PMI data, and to far less relevant extent France, which always has been the dynamo in European economic growth), manufacturing and services PMI, both of which missed expectations or declined substantially, reaffirming that the German economy is getting dragged down more and more into recession even as continues funding the rescue of the periphery. As the chart from Markit below shows, German PMI is hinting at a solidly negative German GDP print, further confirmed by the German IFO business print which came at 100, a drop from 101.4 and below expectations of 101.6. Other secondary macroeconomic data was just as bad, which explains why futures are now well on their way to dropping back to their lows. Finally, today we get the FOMC statement, which will be much ado about nothing, and will merely serve as an appetizer to the December FOMC meeting, when Goldman (and Zero Hedge) now expected the Fed to expand unsterilized monthly monetization to increase from $40 billion to $85 billion (more on the shortly). Yet perhaps the biggest shift in mood has been coming out of our old friend Greece, where Troika negotiations, largely under the radar, are progressing from bad to worse, where the bond buyback plan was scuttled last night (as ZH reported sending Greek bonds 70 bps wider on the day and rising), and where the probability of another flash election, which can crash the precarious European balance in an instant, is rising with each passing day.

Easy come, easier go. After yesterday's last hour ramp driven by a MarketWatch article that said absolutely nothing new about the Fed's monetization plans and an AAPL surge which saw the firm add $22 billion in market cap in one day (or more than the market cap of CBS Corp) sent stocks green, the overnight session has taken it all away and then some, with futures now trading roughly 12 ticks lower or at yesterday's lowest levels. The catalyst is, once again, Spain where Moody's downgraded five Spanish regions including Catalonia after the market close (for the reason, see our piece from the weekend "Spanish Regional Bailout Fund Runs Out Of Money"), coupled with news from Confidencial that Spain's budget deficit will overshoot the EU target of 6.3% and hit at least 7.3%, driven by a €10.5 billion deficit in the social security system, trashing the promises from last month's Spain's "reform" package, and as BNP said (confirming what we warned weeks ago), making the conditionality hurdle suddenly that much higher for Spain. And just as the world was getting comfortable that Spain will get away with using the OMP with virtually no conditions. The cherry on top came from France where the business conditions index slid to a 3 year low on expectations a trough had been put in place. The result is a tumble in the EURUSD to below the 1.3000 barrier, dragging stock futures, commodities, and of course Europe with it, sending the Spanish bond curve yield higher, and generally giving a very sour mood to the day as traders walk in.

We’re talking about a banking system that is nearly four times that of the US ($46 trillion vs. $12 trillion) with at least twice the amount of leverage (26 to 1 for the EU vs. 13 to 1 for the US), and a Central Bank that has stuffed its balance sheet with loads of garbage debts, giving it a leverage level of 36 to 1.

So far the Fed's 4 year old QEasing strategy has failed for the simple reason that the smart money instead of being "herded", has far more simply decided to just front-run the Fed thus generating risk-free returns, while the "dumb money", tired of the HFT and Fed-manipulated, and utterly broken casino market, has simply allocated residual capital either into deposits (M2 just hit a new all time record of $10.2 trillion) or into "return of capital" products such as taxable and non-taxable bonds. Alas none of the above means that the Fed will ever stop from the "strategy" it undertook nearly 4 years ago to the day with QE1. Instead, it will continue doing more of the same until the bitter end. But how much more is there? To answer this question, below we present the entire universe of marketable US debt, in one simple chart showing the average yield by product type on the Y-axis, and the total debt notional on the X.