SPY

We'll give you a hint, says Nanex: fantaseconds. Fantaseconds, everywhere. This is how High Frequency Trading (HFT) practically minted money during the financial crisis. With no regulators in sight, HFT robbed investors and other traders blind. With very little effort, Nanex has created numerous charts to illustrate the absurdity that markets functioned well during the financial meltdown. Many of the short term oscillations shown in these charts were created by HFT algos to induce a lag and create latency arbitrage opportunities. And yet the regulators could not spot a single one. Even after spending millions on MIDAS.

After eight years at the helm of "America's secret cyber army", NSA head Keith Alexander, has decided to spend more time with his family and less time with yours, and is stepping down. According to US officials, the director of the NSA and his deputy are expected to depart in coming months, in a move that almost certainly would not have happened without the involvement of America's most infamous whitsleblower currently self-exiled in Russia, Edward Snowden in a development which according to Reuters, "could give Obama a chance to reshape the eavesdropping agency." It is unclear what he would "reshape" it into: at last check the Stasi headquarters in Berlin did not have quite the capacity to house the Cray supercomputers needed to make sure that anyone and everyone caught selling stocks gets a lifetime audit guarantee from the IRS. We are confident, however, that with the surge in government-employed architects coming back to "work" from their 17 days paid vacation, someone will have an idea or two.

Apparently the IRS has fallen on hard times in light of all this government shutdown and sequestration nonsense. Too bad. According to a recent report from the Treasury Department, ‘enforcement revenue’ at the IRS has fallen for the second straight year. Tax enforcement is one of the only ‘money makers’ for the US government; according to the IRS, every dollar spent on tax enforcement generates six dollars in additional tax revenue.  Unfortunately for the IRS, though, the agency’s head count has been thinning. They no longer have enough people, and enforcement revenue has been declining. Ordinarily the IRS supplements its ranks with legions of unpaid spies in the financial sector. Starting July 1, 2014, though, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) will give the IRS a new addition in its ever-growing list of unpaid spies. You.

Long before Edward Snowden's whistleblowing revelations hit the world and the Obama administration's approval ratings like a ton of bricks, we ran a story in March 2012 which exposed the NSA's unprecedented domestic espionage project, codenamed Stellar Wind, and specifically the $1.4+ billion data center spy facility located in Bluffdale, Utah, which spans more than one million square feet, uses 65 megawatts of energy (enough to power a city of more than  20,000), and can store exabytes or even zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is 100 million times larger than all the printed material in the Library of Congress), consisting of every single electronic communication in the world, whether captured with a warrant or not. Yet despite all signs to the contrary, Uber-general Keith Alexander and his spy army are only human, and as the WSJ reports, the NSA's Bluffdale data center - whose interior may not be modeled for the bridge of the Starship Enterprise - has been hobbled by chronic electrical surges as a result of at least 10 electrical meltdowns in the past 13 months.

The last few days have been punctuated with fearmongery from Alexander and Clapper over the shutdown's impact on the NSA and the increased threat of terror this generates. However, as the Washington Times reports, things are a little different in reality. Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA’s huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two — far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration.

The dump into last night's close marked the lows of the last 24 hours as US equities decided that worrying about government shutdowns, near-record negative earnings pre-announcements, disappointing job growth, debt-ceiling dynamics that are increasingly feared in money markets, and a reversal in the key "soft" survey data was not enough to stop them BTFATH (thanks to confused banter from several Fed heads). Sell Gold, Sell Bonds, Buy Stocks - sure why not!

“Spies … Can Now, For The First Time, Monitor Everything About Us, And They Can Do So With A Few Clicks Of A Mouse And – To Placate The Lawyers – A Drop-Down Menu Of Justifications”

There really is very little reason why this "government shutdown" cannot continue indefinitely because almost everything is still running.  63 percent of all federal workers are still working, and 85 percent of all government activities are still being funded during this "shutdown". It turns out that the definition of "essential personnel" has expanded so much over the years that almost everyone is considered "essential" at this point.  In fact, this shutdown is such a non-event that even referring to it as a "partial government shutdown" would really be overstating what is actually happening. In the end, this shutdown could turn out to be very good for America.  We have a government that is wildly out of control and that desperately needs to be reigned in.

Stocks have fallen for 9 of the last 11 days since the Un-Taper and the S&P has falen 3.7% from its highs. Volume today was above average (as we note CBOE SPY options volume set an all-time record yesterday) and thanks to a 1% or so rally off the lows on the back of a restatement that Speaker Boehner doesn't want to see carnage, the S&P managed to scramble back above the 50DMA. A late-day collapse (what no VIX pumpathon today?) closed us below that crucial level for the first time in a month. VIX rose 1 vol to 17.6% by the close (off its highs). Treasuries rallied in general (but the 30Y ended the day unch as the curve steepened notably). The USD fell some more  (-0.65% on the week) as JPY and EUR strength didn't help but gold and silver closed unch, oil and copper down 1%.

First, the good news. During a Senate hearing earlier today, Gen. Keith Alexander (in charge of America's Secret Cyber Army) said: "We have over 960 Ph.D.s, over 4,000 computer scientists, over a thousand mathematicians. They are furloughed. Our nation needs people like this."

Now the bad news. While the number of NSA employees is officially classified, in 2012 the NSA said more than 30,000 employees work at Ft. Meade and other facilities. In 2012 John C. Inglis, the deputy director, said that the total number of NSA employees is "somewhere between 37,000 and one billion" as a joke, and stated that the agency is "probably the biggest employer of introverts." In 2013 Der Spiegel, likely using source data from Edward Snowden, said that the NSA had 40,000 employees.

While bubbling assets are a major part of the history of the Greenspan/Bernanke economy, so too is unsustainable borrowing. It seems wise to keep an eye out for another borrowing binge, especially as policymakers are encouraging all forms of financial risk-taking.  And one place to check is the Fed’s quarterly “Flow of Funds” report, which recently took the fancy new title, “Financial Accounts of the United States,” but still goes by the nickname “Z1.” There’s a cautionary note in comparisons of today’s leverage ratio to the last three expansions. The last three times the ratio jumped above the current reading of 7.2 were Q1 1990, Q1 1999 and Q2 2007. And from these points in time, the economy fell into recession about a year later, or less, in each case. (The respective times to recession were two, four and two quarters.)

New Revelations Are Breaking Every Day

Privacy has been traded in for corporate profits, governmental controls, spookily personalized ads, and harebrained hype about increased security

Raghuram Rajan has been in his job at the head of the Reserve Bank of India for just a few weeks now and already changes are being made as the 23rd President

We hope everyone is enjpying the spoils of war from reading the FOMC statement and buying appropriately. Of course, as Nanex shows, unless your trigger finger hit that big green button within a millisecond or so, you missed the entire move...