GAAP

While the Greek government has wasted the past 4 months experiment with game (and hope) theory-based negotiations with the Troika, debating what reforms it should implement, what the budget surplus should be, and how much of a pension and wage haircut the local workforce should undergo just to keep the trickle of European money flowing and "allow" the IMF to repay Greek IMF obligations and the ESM to repay the ECB, the Greek economy has slammed into a brick wall because according to Greece's retailers association, about 59 businesses close down and some 613 jobs are being lost each day.

Just days after JPMorgan revealed it would fire another 5,000 by the end of the year in a "scalpel" headcount reduction, overnight the world's favorite drug money laundering bank HSBC unleashed the "machete" and announced it would cut almost 50,000 workers, or one in five bankers, a move which would shrink the investment bank division by one-third. The reason: the same why US corporations are laying off tens of thousands so they can fund record stock buybacks and enrich their shareholders - to boost profits so that more money can be channeled in the form of dividends.

After years of crusading against the farce of non-gAAP "earnings" by management teams who are engaging in fraud against their shareholders, one in which both accountants, bank advisors and regulators are all complicit, we are delighted to see that finally the mainstream press has taken the bullshit that is non-GAAP "EPS" to task. In a report by AP's Bernard Candon, titled "Experts worry that 'phony numbers' are misleading investors" we read that the "record profits that companies are reporting may not be all they're cracked up to be." He was being very polite.

If any evidence was needed that the market is dying at the zero bound, it came in this week’s violent 15-minute rip when the algos read the Fed’s release to mean there will be no rate hike in June. It put you in mind of monetary rigor mortis - the last spasm of something that’s already dead but doesn’t know it. The Great Financial Bubble dying at the zero bound has been inflating with just three interruptions - 1987, 2000 and 2008-09 - for the last 33 years. As a result, the market value of stocks, bonds and other debts have simply become decoupled from national income.

How is it that the company's GAAP EPS declined by a whopping 17%, from $0.66 to $0.55, and yet its non-GAAP EPS dropped by a tiny 1% from 0.88% to 0.87%? This is how...

In welfare state America its virtually certain that through one artifice or another taxes will go up and the national debt burden will rise to crushing heights in order to keep the baby boomers’ entitlements funded. While Keynesians and Wall Street stock peddlers are clueless about the implications of this - it actually doesn’t take too much common sense to get the drift. Namely, under a long-term path of fewer producers, higher taxes and more public debt, the prospects for rejuvenating the previous historically average rates of real output growth are somewhere between slim and none - to say nothing of the super-normal rates implied by the markets’ current bullish enthusiasm.

Three days ago, when looking at the unprecedented, record outflows from US equities  we asked a simple question: "who is buying... no really". We now have the answer.

"We remain constructive on the US for three reasons: 1) economic data should improve in the next few quarters; 2) the Fed does not seem to be in any rush to move early and a June rate hike seems unlikely; and 3) while investors are focused solely on the first rate raise, we think the overall path higher will be gradual, in contrast to previous rate shifts. These factors should create an environment where growth improves and monetary policy stays flexible, which is generally good for equities (higher multiples notwithstanding). We may follow last year’s playbook and ignore the old adage to “sell in May and go away.”

Well, the leak (which ironically came out on Twitter only, and not Facebook) was right, and the full story is even worse than Selerity reported:TWITTER 1Q LOSS PER SHARE 25C; TWITTER INC 1Q ADJ. EPS 7C , EST. 4C.
That much we knew. Here is where it gets worse:

• TWITTER 1Q REV. $ 435.9M, EST. $456.2M
• TWITTER SEES 2Q REV. $470M TO $485M, EST. $538.1M
• TWTR SEES YR REV $2.170B-$2.270B, SAW $2.3B-$2.35B, EST $2.37B

And now perhaps someone will ask how much of Facebook's 1.4 billion "users" are actually real.

It has been a story of two markets so far, with China's Shanghai Composite up another 3% in today's continuation of the most ridiculous, banana-stand driven move of the New Normal (and there have been many ridiculous moves in the past 6 years) on the previously reported hints that the PBOC is gearing up to start its own QE, while Europe and the Eurostoxx are lagging, if only for the time being until Citadel and Virtu engage in today's preapproved risk-on momentum ignition, on Greek jitters, the same jitters that last week were "fixed"and sent Greek stocks and bonds soaring. Needless to say, neither Greek bonds nor stocks aren't soaring following what has been the worst week for Greece in months.

It’s official: all the markers of manias both past and present have now been surpassed.

The reason one can't help but wonder just how much of FB's "users" are merely robotic autoclicks and/or originate at various clickfarms somewhere in Asia, is that taking the Google Trends chart posted above, and represented as of today, reveals something troubling.

IBM numbers in a nutshell: Revenue dropped by 11.9% to $19.6 billion; Net Income dropped by 2.4% to $2.3 billion...

And yet... GAAP EPS rose by 2.6% to $2.36!

Here's the accounting magic behind this "beat"

Just as the S&P appeared set to blast off to a forward GAAP PE > 21.0x, here comes Greece and drags it back down to a far more somber 20.0x. The catalyst this time is an FT article according to which officials of now openly insolvent Greece have made an informal approach to the International Monetary Fund to delay repayments of loans to the international lender, but were told that no rescheduling was possible.  The result if a drop in not only US equity futures which are down 8 points at last check, but also yields across the board with the German 10Y Bund now just single basis points above 0.00% (the German 9Y is now < 0), on its way to -0.20% at which point it will lead to a very awkward "crossing the streams" moment for the ECB.

One look at BofA's earnings report shows why contrary to popular opinion, the bank that bailed out insolvent Merrill Lynch is far better off to be pnealized with tens of billions in legal fees than running its business unbothered by the racketeering government. The reason: a year after BofA reported $6 billion in litigation charges, moments ago Bank of America announced only $0.4 billion in legal fees, which meant it barely had any credible addbacks. So when looking at its numbers on a realistic, GAAP basis, BofA once again missed EPS, with the bottom line printing at $0.27, or below the $0.29 estimate.