LIBOR

What do the following have in common? LIBOR, Bernie Madoff, MF Global, Peregrine Financial, zero-percent interest rates, the Social Security and Medicare entitlement funds, many state and municipal pension funds, mark-to-model asset values, quote stuffing and high frequency trading (HFT), and debt-based money? The answer is that every single thing in that list is an example of market rigging, fraud, or both. How are we supposed to make decisions in today’s rigged and often fraudulent market environment? Where should you put your money if you don’t know where the risks lie? How does one control risk when control fraud runs rampant? Unfortunately, there are no perfect answers to these questions. Instead, the task is to recognize what sort of world we happen to live in today and adjust one’s actions to the realities as they happen to be. The purpose of this report is not to stir up resentment or anger -- although those are perfectly valid responses to the abuses we are forced to live with -- but to simply acknowledge the landscape as it is so that we can make informed decisions.

From HFT to LIBOR manipulation and European bond legal-covenants, and now Auto-manufacturer channel-stuffing; all conspiracy 'theories' proved conspiracy 'facts' - as Gabby Douglas might say "Nailed It!" We have been vociferously pointing out the incredible levels of channel-stuffing occurring at GM in the US, then China, and most recently into Europe (must read here) and now the WSJ confirms the latter; as sales of BMW and Mercedes, helped by heavy discounts and contingencies to dealers, are being questioned.  Kenn Sparks, a BMW spokesman, said its July sales total includes vehicles that were purchased by its dealers for use as what are known as "demos"— cars used on lots for test drives. He declined to say how many reported sales were demos, saying BMW doesn't release the figure. "These vehicles may stay on the lot because they are used as demo models," he said. BMW's incentives appeared to help propel the car maker to a 1,900-vehicle lead over Mercedes-Benz (as stunningly ridiculously surprisingly 7-Series sales tripled MoM, and 3-Series doubled).

We Are Witnessing a Financial Holocaust Brought on by the Banksters … Which Is Causing Many Deaths

• World’s Oldest Shipping Company Closes In Industry Slide (Bloomberg)
• Japan Growth May Slow to Half Previous Pace as Exports Wane (Bloomberg)
• China Export Growth Slides As World Recovery Slows (Bloomberg)
• Weidmann tries to muffle not spike Draghi's ECB guns (Reuters)
• Draghi lays out toolkit to save eurozone (FT)
• Concerns grow over prospects for sterling (FT)
• RIM Said To Draw Interest From IBM On Enterprise Services (Bloomberg)
• UN urges US to cut ethanol production (FT)
• Goldman Sachs Leads Split With Obama, As GE Jilts Him Too (Bloomberg)
• New apartments boost US building sector (FT)

Scandal after scandal – but the Fed just doesn’t want to be audited. Period.

With bank exec heads rolling, investigations hotting up globally, politicians fuming and investors exercising caution in bank shares, the LIBOR scandal is fueling massive speculation about the long-term ramifications for the industry. Indeed, after all that the banking industry has faced in the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble, an anonymously quoted bank CEO in a recent Economist story proclaimed "This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment." While there are more reasons not to draw parallels between the banking industry now and the tobacco industry of the mid-1990’s than there are similarities, we thought it would be interesting to review the impact on Tobacco during its "moment", and beyond.

It's very simple really. Please point out where on the below list of Top 20 contributors to a randomly selected US politician, in this case New York's Chuck Schumer, can one find Standard Chartered, Barclays, or HSBC?

Putting our trust and faith in a few unelected bureaucrats and bankers, who use their obscene wealth to buy off politicians in writing the laws and regulations to favor them has proven to be a death knell for our country. The captured main stream media proclaims these men to be heroes and saviors of the world, when they are truly the villains in this episode. These are the men who unleashed the frenzy of Wall Street greed and pillaging by repealing Glass Steagall, blocking Brooksley Born’s efforts to regulate derivatives, encouraging mortgage fraud, not enforcing existing regulations, and creating speculative bubbles through excessively low interest rates and making it known they would bailout recklessness. They have created an overly complex tangled financial system so they could peddle propaganda to the math challenged American public without fear of being caught in their web of lies. Big government, big banks and big legislation like Dodd/Frank and Obamacare are designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The system has been captured by a plutocracy of self-serving men. They don’t care about you or your children. We are only given 80 years, or so, on this earth and our purpose should be to sustain our economic and political system in a balanced way, so our children and their children have a chance at a decent life. Do you trust that is the purpose of those in power today? Should we trust the jackals and grifters who got us into this mess, to get us out?   

Here are my thoughts from the VALUEx Vail conference. The idea for this conference came to me when I attended VALUEx Zurich, organized by Guy Spier and John Mihaljevic in February 2011 (you can register for VALUEx Zurich 2013, here). The thought of spending three days learning and sharing ideas with smart, like-minded value investors felt instantly right. Investing on some level is a never-ending pursuit to get better. Most of us are locked up in air-conditioned offices where we learn through reading SEC filings, magazines, blogs, etc.

The idea of “collapse”, social and financial, comes with an incredible array of hypothetical consequences ranging from public dissent and martial law, to the complete disintegration of infrastructure and the devolution of mankind into a swarm of mindless arm chewing cannibals.  In an age of television nirvana and cinema overload, I have found that the collective unconscious of our culture has now defined what collapse is based only on the most narrow of extremes.  If they aren’t being hunted down by machete wielding looters or swastika wearing jackboots, then the average American dupe figures that the country is not in much danger.  Hollywood fantasy has blinded us to the tangible crises at our doorstep. In 2012, we still await that trigger event, which I believe will be the announcement of QE3 (or any unlimited stimulus program regardless of title), and the final debasement of the dollar.  At the beginning of this year, I pointed out that we were likely to see such an announcement before 2012 was out, and it would seem that the private Federal Reserve is right on track. Last month, the Fed announced that it was formulating a plan to “expand its tool kit”.

• Standard Chartered Falls Most in 24 Years on U.S. Iran Probe (Bloomberg)
• Iran accusations wipe $15 billion off StanChart shares (Reuters)
• Hilsenrath tells us that Fed Official Calls for Open-Ended Bond Buying (WSJ) - shocking indeed
• German opposition backs fiscal union, demands constitutional change and referendum (FT)
• Gary Gensler speaks: Libor, Naked and Exposed (NYT)
• IMF Pushes Europe to Ease Greek Burden (WSJ)
• Second TSE System Error in Seven Months Halts Derivatives (Bloomberg)
• Rice Hoard Offers World Respite as Food Costs Surge (Bloomberg)
• UK coalition in crisis over parliamentary reform (Reuters)
• Ethics probe could deal losing hand to Nevada Democrat (Reuters)

Instead of having to fire 1900 people, Deutsche Bank will now have to only let go 1899. The reason: the second most prominent casualty of the Lieborgate scandal is now none other than Bob Diamond's daughter Nell, who made quite a splash in the aftermath of the Barclays Libor manipulation revelations when the social circuit butterfly tweeted that "George Osborne and Ed Miliband can go ahead and #hmd.” As it turns out after graduation from Princeton University in June 2011, and following a stint in UNICEF, the philanthropist, whose twitter profile is riddled with photos of shoes and runway poses, joined Deutsche Bank in November 2011, whether due to her natural curiosity into the minutae of Investment Banking, or for other reasons. Of course, considering her Princeton thesis was on "The Cultural Myth of Female Hair in the Victorian Imagination" (strinkingly comparable to "The Power Of Women's Hair In The Victorian Imagination" but we digress), it likely was the latter. As it turns out, 9 months after joining the firm full time (she had a part-time stint in the summer of 2010, following comparable stints at the Abernathy Macgregor Group, Nantucket Ice Cream Company, Abercrombie and Fitch), the young woman who sold "Rates" products (Libor and other IR derivatives? Surely that would be ironic at a bank which is now front and center into the Lieborgate investigation) at Deutsche Bank has decided to call it quits, in the process saving the job of at least one low level banker who now will not have to be let go because of the lack of an English thesis focusing on Female hair during Victorian times

In what may be the most amusing news of the day, according to the FT the CFTC will shortly drop its 4 year old investigation into silver manipulation, "after US regulators failed to find enough evidence to support a legal case, according to three people familiar with the situation." How about evidence to support an "illegal" case? Of course, that this is happening after the recent discovery that the world's most pervasive fixed income benchmark was manipulated for years, if not decades, can only be reason for laughter and wonder if the CFTC used the same assiduous diligence methods in pursuing the alleged perpetrators of precious metal manipulation as it did in letting the fraud at PFG slip through its fingers for two decades. We will probably never know, or at least not until an email mentioning bottles of Bollinger and silver price "fixing", (or "banging the close" for that matter) in the same sentence inexplicably turns up and makes a complete mockery of the CFTC yet again.

Will the Peasants Go Medieval?

What a difference a revisionist market rally makes. Remember when everyone was involved in Libor manipulation? No? Curious what a few hundred DJIA points will do especially when the corporate revenues and supporting them simply are not there, and one goes all in on multiple expansion. One entity which, however, has not forgotten about Lieborgate is Pimco parent and Europe's largest insurance firm, Allianz. And they are not happy: "Europe's biggest insurer, Allianz, is worried about the role central banks may have played in an interest rate rigging scandal that has enveloped some leading international lenders, the insurer's chief financial officer said on Friday. "We do not find it funny, what has happened, in particular the arising implication that it is not just the banks but central banks being involved in this," Oliver Baete told a conference call with analysts. "That really gives us cause for concern," Baete added." Of course, neither the ECB nor the FED could care much, considering that Allianz would be immediately insolvent if the same central banks who manipulated Libor stopped manipulating interest rates... which is implicitly what Allianz is unhappy about.