Commercial Real Estate

A week earlier, we presented Moody's proposed take on which banks are at risk of failing Europe's Stress Test version 2 (which is nothing but another huge waste of time), the results of which are due to be announced later today. The event will likely be market moving although we expect it will be at most 3 months before a bank that passed the test fails in spectacular fashion, laying the groundwork for next year's Stress Test part 3: the most stringent of all, and so forth. Below is RanSquawk's comprehensive take on what to expect from today's announcement. "Last years stress test results indicated that despite a modest capital shortfall of EUR 3.5bln, overall, the EU banking system was well capitalised and that there was no major risk stemming from sovereign exposure. However, policy makers suffered a massive credibility blow after Ireland was forced to seek monetary assistance after Irish banks lost access to capital markets following revelations of massive financing gaps which in turn endangered the country itself. As such, this year’s stress tests, which have been carried out on 90 banks, have been designed to be more stringent in nature and should provide market participants with some degree of relief."

Continuing our exploration of why small business isn't expanding and hiring: here are four more deeply pernicious structural dynamics crushing small business. Yesterday I addressed this issue in Here's Why Small Business Isn't Hiring, and Won't be Hiring; Part II covers three other three systemic issues: 1. The real estate bubble completely mispriced/overvalued commercial real estate; 2. Financing is cheap to global Corporate America and costly to nonexistent to startups and expanding small businesses; 3. Crony capitalism doesn't like competition; it seeks monopoly or a shadow cartel, imposed and maintained by the regulatory agencies of the Central State;
4. Overlapping regulation designed to suppress competition, benign neglect/hostility from government bureaucracies obsessed with self-preservation and lack of financing make it impossible to scale up a success business in the real world.

Equities internationally and bonds in Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy have fallen this morning while gold rose to new record nominal highs in euros and pounds (over EUR1,118/oz GBP980/oz respectively). The Italian 10 year rose above 6% for the first time and the Spanish 10 year yield rose to 6.12%. US stock futures are pointing to losses on the U.S. opening. Irish government bonds have reached a new euro era record high with the 10 year rising to 13.57% - up from 11.6% only 5 days ago. Ireland’s “bail out” is clearly not working as contagion deepens in the eurozone.

If you are a resident or large asset holder in one of these countries laden with excess bailout debt that it can never repay, watch your back! As Malcom X once said, "If you plunge a knife in my back 9 inches deep, and pull it out 3 inches... That's not progress!"

China is slowly starting to face the consequences of its actions

The EU vs US - Who Crashes First? Reserve currency status is a very strong lever, historically. Equally important, the holder of said status has usually held the most powerful military and technology as well. Meanwhile, the EU has the twin problem of CRE debt rolling over on underwater properties and devalued (by up to 50%) sovereign debt held at 30x leverage as risk free assets at par by the banking system. True, the US has similar CRE issues + housing depression... So much to contrast & compare.

We have not recovered from the Great Recession and thus our current economic stagnation is less a new event than a continuation of the original collapse. The basis for the so-called “recovery” was a rise in GDP, that measure of what we have spent in the economy. It’s a fairly useless bit of data.

The most concise summary of this week's bullish and bearish events.

Have you ever looked beneath the hood of the big European banks? It's scary for the average layperson & it even scarier if you actually understand what it is you are looking at. What we have hear is EXACTLY what I found in early 2008, INSOLVENCY - laid out plainly for all to see - at least all who ever bothered to take a look! Throw Kilo after Kilo of leveraged fiat currency meat into the insolvent sovereign PIIGS' maw & you won't ever see it again:

Goldman's business model is designed around the exploitation of secrecy. Secrecy is organizing principle that governs modern credit markets. Credit default swaps, privately placed structured securitizations (e.g. CDOs), and hedge funds have all flourished-- they dominate the debt markets--because they are all designed to exploit secrecy. They all create extraordinary profits by keeping the rest of us in the dark. So in late 2006, if you wanted to find out what was happening in this newly created synthetic RMBS market, you couldn't find out much of anything. You couldn't find out anything about who bought or sold any CDO, or what was in any CDO, or how any CDO performed, unless Goldman or some other CDO underwriter deemed you sufficiently worthy of their selective disclosures. You couldn't learn anything from the sales or trading activity of mortgage bonds, because the related trading in credit default swaps was kept hidden beneath the surface. You didn't know anything about the trading activity related to the ABX indices, since that, also, was kept secret. And since the privately-held company that owned the ABX, CDS IndexCo LLC, operated in total secrecy, and since the privately-held company that published the price of the ABX, Markit Group Limited , operated in total secrecy, you had no way of knowing the extent to which the price of the ABX was manipulated through round-tripping, side deals with synthetic CDOs, or anything else. The only thing you knew, your only link to the illusory "reality " of market sentiment, was the quoted price of the ABX. And you might happen to know that the Chairman of CDS IndexCo was Brad Levy, a managing director at Goldman, which, along with a handful of other banks, controlled CDS IndexCo and Markit Group. Both the FCIC and the Levin subcommittee disclosed a wealth of information that others with a more skeptical bent can scrutinize in depth. This information poses a direct challenge to Goldman's dissembling, and to the moral hazard of access journalism, which is no substitute for the full transparency of a free and open marketplace of ideas.

The near 100% equity run up at the height of the correction was easily seen by my and my staff, but I severely underestimated the breadth and depth of this synthetically contrived, central bank centrally planned, bear market rally (which is essentially what has been called a "recovery" of late).

Greece is not in court. But there is talk of a “higher law,” much as was discussed in the United States before the Civil War regarding slavery. At issue today is the financial analogue, debt peonage.

The downturn in the economy caught most economists by surprise. They have yet to realize that we are now in a stagflationary economy. All the signs are there, yet they have no explanation for it. QE3 anyone?

The banks can be trusted... Truly! All of them, but particularly the BIG ones! JP Morgan slashes loss provisions on RE loan assets by more than Dexia actually provisions for said losses in anticipation of sale. This is bullish, of course, so Goldman puts JPM on their "CONVICT"ion buy list in order to create the buying pressure necessary to dump prop inventory. Of course, this is just speculation on my part. After all, they would never do such a thing with Apple, would they?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper brought a message from Canadian politics to his Greek counterpart Saturday. But is it the right message?