Citigroup

Life ain’t fair

With AAPL and several other strange-attracting hedge fund hotels dominating the holdings of the 2-and-20'ers, we thought it timely that Bloomberg TV would point out today that their aggregate hedge fund index is now significantly underperforming the S&P 500 (from both the top in 2007 and the lows in 2009 - in order to be fair). While the assumption is that 'sophisticated' investors are paying for alpha - and as always the focus is absolute return on the way up no matter what the mandate - it seems the extreme correlations both across asset-class and within-and-across individual equities (as we have discussed in depth - most recently here) have indeed eaten into any 'value' that has empirically been added. As The Economist notes, in June "funds suffered the largest withdrawals in assets since October 2009." Furthermore, as Citi's recent study on risk drivers shows, the high-beta momentum trade has become by far the most crowded trade around - so even sales of DB9s and NYC apartments are now entirely dependent on NEW QE coming before year-end.

There are those who say gold may go to $10,000 or to $0, or somewhere in between; in a different universe, they would be the people furiously staring at the trees. For a quick look at the forest, we suggest readers have a glance at the chart below. It shows that just in the first five months of 2012 alone, China has imported more gold, a total of 315 tons, than all the official gold holdings of the UK, at 310.3 according to the WGC/IMF (a country which infamously sold 400 tons of gold by Gordon Brown at ~$275/ounce).

Who Are the Biggest Manipulators of All?

Netflix stocks surged more than 21% in one week primarily due to an upbeat Facebook update from the company's CEO.

Fed Chairman Bernanke should be impeached if he does not restore Fed surveillance over primary dealers immediately.

The FDIC decided to wait with its dose of pre-holiday humor until after the Barclays fixing for today's market close turned out to be spot on. And by that we mean that official release of the US banks' "living will" statements, which as far as we know is about the most worthless exercise ever conducted, and about the dumbest thing to be conceived by that very undynamic duo of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Because last we checked, the treatment of living wills in bankruptcy court, where all these firms will end up eventually anyway, is... non-existent. But the real fun is when one actually reads this indicative statement from Citigroup: "Citi is today a fundamentally different institution than it was before the crisis." And that's where we stopped. Because it is banks wasting their time (and taxpayer bailout money) on gibberish like this instead of analyzing the risk inherent in their prop positions that guarantees the next CIO-like blow up will not be just $5 billion but far, far more, and will certainly prove that living wills when one has to equitize tens of billions in unsecured debt are worth exactly didely squat.

Local Governments Which Entered Into Interest Rate Swaps Got Scalped

Here’s a really wild hypothesis: if the LIBOR rate was under manipulation in 2008, is it not possible that the inter-bank lending rate spike (and resultant credit freeze) was at least partly a product of manipulation by the banking cartel? Could the manipulators have purposely exacerbated the freeze, to get a bigger and quicker bailout? After all, the banking system sucked $29 trillion out of the taxpayer following 2008. That’s a pretty big payoff. LIBOR profoundly affects credit availability — and the bailouts were directly designed to combat a freeze in credit availability. If market participants were manipulating or rigging LIBOR, they were manipulating a variable directly tied to the bailouts.

While Belgian caterers are delighted that Europe's increasingly more unelected leaders quarrel endlessly over who gets to foot the bill to keep the market fooled for one more week that things are fixed, Europe is burning. The just released MarkIt PMI data showed that while Spanish bonds may be up 50 bps one day, down 75 bps the next, "the downturn in the Eurozone manufacturing sector extended to an eleventh successive month. Production and new orders suffered further severe contractions, leading to the steepest job losses since January 2010." And here is where Germany, which as noted earlier, is becoming isolated in its European bailout ambitions, should pay attention: "The rate of decline in Germany was the steepest for three years, and marked a fourth successive monthly decline in the region’s largest economy." This metric is only going to get worse, only in the future it will be coupled with increasingly more direct and contingent debt all around. And further confirming that there is no easy way out for Europe was the May Eurozone unemployment number which at 11.1% rose to a new record

… But Receive Only a Light Slap on the Wrist

JP Morgan Sucks at the Government Teat

... and Regulators Have Become “Cops On the Take”

Sell side Wall Street vs Reggie Middleton on FB - 6 buys, 3 neutrals, avg price target $39. NOBODY came out with a short @ IPO besides moi. Guess where I stand now...

• France to Lift Minimum Wage in Bid to Rev Up Economy (WSJ)... weeks after it cut the retirement age
• Merkel Urged to Back Euro Crisis Measures (FT)
• Monti lashes out at Germany ahead of summit (FT)
• Italy Official Seeks Culture Shift in New Law (WSJ)
• Migrant workers and locals clash in China town (BBC)
• Romney Would Get Tough on China (Reuters)
• Bank downgrades trigger billions in collateral calls (IFRE)
• Gold Drops as US Data, China Speculation Temper Europe (Bloomberg)