Market Manipulation

• Wal-Mart misses topline expectations: Revenue $113.93bn, Exp $114.89bn, Sees full year EPS $4.88-$4.93, Exp. $4.94, Unveils new FCPA allegations; Stock down nearly 4%
• China chooses conservative new leaders (FT)
• Eurozone falls back into recession (FT)
• Moody’s to Assess U.K.’s Aaa Rating in 2013 Amid Slowing Economy (Bloomberg)
• Another bailout is imminent: FHA Nears Need for Taxpayer Funds (WSJ)
• Hamas chief vows to keep up "resistance" after Jaabari killed (Reuters)
• Obama calls for rich to pay more, keep middle-class cuts (Reuters)
• Obama Undecided on FBI's Petraeus Probe (WSJ)
• Battle lines drawn over “growth revenue” in fiscal cliff talks (Reuters)
• Rajoy’s Path to Bailout Clears as EU Endorses Austerity (Bloomberg)
• Zhou Seen Leaving PBOC as China Picks New Economic Chiefs (Bloomberg)
• Russia warns of tough response to U.S. human rights bill (Reuters)
• Japan Opposition Leader Ups Pressure on Central Bank (WSJ)
• Zhou Seen Leaving PBOC as China Picks New Economic Chiefs (Bloomberg)

China needs to add to its gold reserves to ensure national economic and financial safety, promote yuan globalization and as a hedge against foreign- reserve risks, Gao Wei, an official from the Department of International Economic Affairs of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, writes in a commentary in the China Securities Journal today which was reported on by Bloomberg. China’s gold reserve is “too small”, Gao said and while gold prices are currently near record highs, China can build its reserves by buying low and selling high amid the short-term volatility, Gao wrote. The People’s Bank of China is accumulating significant volumes of gold under the radar of many less informed market participants which is bullish. The Chinese government is secretive about its gold diversification and buying and does not disclose gold purchases to the IMF. Therefore, there has been no official update to their holdings since the barely reported upon announcement four years ago that Chinese gold reserves had risen from just over 500 tonnes to over 1,000 tonnes.

Well, my fellow Slope-a-Dopes, you may have noticed that I have been completely turned upside down by this week's developments.  Let me be clear, my crazed compromised counter comportment has nothing to do with the fact that the sitting U.S. president was re-elected.  After all, every single national poll, swing state survey, and comprehensive electoral college considerations, had the President as the winner by a cushy considerably comfortable count.  In this age of definitive digital data mining, why anyone would have been surprised by the well known outcome entirely eludes even eye.  The only truly shocking surprise, would have been if the dastardly dog delivery dirtbag had beaten the coy corrupt community creep.  So what has utterly upset & upended your favorite Idiot Savant's uneven universe?

Trish Regan and Adam Johnson do their best to hold themselves together in this sublime rant by 'Gloom, Boom & Doom's Marc Faber on Bloomberg TV as he sees Obama's re-election as "very negative for the economy". From his view that the market should be down at least 20% - and maybe 50%, to the implied ignorance of both of the candidates, he believes fervently that the "standards of living of people in the western hemisphere will continue to decline." Faber views Obama's re-election as one of many unintended consequences of market manipulation (since Democrat attacks on the wealthy were 'enabled' by their profiteering from Bernanke's money printing) and sees the need to protect one's assets "with a gun, a machine gun... or perhaps a tank." He concludes with a stunner as he exclaims his view doubting Obama will make it through the whole four-year term because "there will be so many scandals" since "there is so much smoke, there must be some fire!"

It just is not Barclays' year. After being exposed (so far the only one) as a ringleader in a massive LIBOR-rigging scandal which cost Bob Diamond his job, yesterday the British bank added insult to injury, after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) fined it $470 million - the largest penalty ever levied by the energy regulator, and even larger than the bank's LIBOR fine - for getting caught doing what Enron got caught doing about a decade ago: manipulating California's electricity markets. Although while the former ended up being the biggest corporate bankruptcy at the time, led to the end of one of the nation's largest auditors and sparked a scandal so great it was all corporate America spoke for about for the next year, this time the news has come and gone, and nobody cares. Perhaps this is to be expected: in a time when none other than the central bank intervenes each and every day in every single market to preserve the "wealth effect", habituation to epic corporate manipulation of every imaginable kind is perfectly normal.

• Millions still lack power (WSJ); New York Region Transit Tracker (WSJ), Blackouts Remain for 6.1 Million as Power Repairs Begin (Bloomberg)
• U.S. regulator seeks $470 million from Barclays (Reuters)
• J.P. Morgan Sues Whale's Ex-Boss (WSJ)
• London Frets Future as Financial Hub Outside Bank Union (Bloomberg)
• SNB now selling EUR: Swiss Central Bank Pulls Off Euro Sleight of Hand (WSJ)
• United Said to Study Biggest Airbus A350 to Replace Jumbos (Bloomberg)
• Draghi expands role in fight to save euro (FT)
• Panasonic Plunges by Daily Limit on Loss Forecast, CDS Soars (BusinessWeek)
• Italy risks economic ‘vicious circle’ (FT)
• Starbucks's European tax bill disappears down $100 million hole (Reuters)
• Bernanke Depression Guru Seeks Roosevelt Well-Being (Bloomberg)

Playing in the market, with Phil. 

In April of 2009 we warned very explicitly that reliance on the fake "liquidity" (which was never liquidity per se but merely volume and churn) by the HFT algos that stuff quotes, frontrun each other, spoof, layer, and generally make a mockery out of the thing fomerly known as the market (which is now more than anything a policy vehicle for central planners but that's a different story) would result in tears. A year later the first flash crash happened, and ever since then more and more people have finally realized how our 3+ year long crusade against HFT (which sadly is now a minor distraction against the far greater evil which is central bank dominance of capital markets) was spot on, confirmed by the recent segments (here, here and here) on CNBC which effectively confirmed the markets are not only a joke, but without any real depth, i.e. fake. What is amusing is that people still don't understand why the exchanges, and the regulators (coopted by the exchanges) allow HFT to continue. Here is the answer: in 2011 the CME made 31.5% of all its revenues from HFT, the ICE: 25.1%, the NYSE: 21.4%, the Nasdaq: 17.1%, the CBOE: 22.4%, and so on.

If there is one dominant consensus in the financial sphere, it is that the Federal Reserve's $85 billion/month bond-and-mortgage-buying "quantitative easing" will inevitably send stocks higher. The general idea is that the Fed buys the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and Treasury bonds from the banks, which turn around and dump the cash into "risk on" assets like equities (stocks). This consensus can be summarized in the time-worn phrase, "Don't fight the Fed." This near-universal confidence in a QE-goosed stock market is reflected in the low level of volatility (the VIX) and other signs of complacency such as relatively few buyers of put options, which are viewed as "insurance" against a decline in stocks. The usual sentiment readings are bullish as well.

But what if QE fails to send stocks higher? Is such a thing even possible? Yes, it does seem "impossible" in a market as rigged and centrally managed as this one, but there are a handful of reasons why QE might not unleash a flood of cash into "risk on" assets every month from now until Doomsday

Back in 2009 Zero Hedge was first the only, and shortly thereafter, one of very few non-conformist voices objecting to pervasive high frequency trading and other type of quantitative market manipulation in the form of Flash Trading (which has recently reemerged in yet another form of frontrunning known as "Hide not Slide" practices) quote stuffing, and naturally latency arbitrage: one of the most subversive means to rob the less than sophisticated investor blind, due to an illegal coordination between market markers, exchanges and regulators, which effectively encouraged a two-tier market (one for the ultra fast frontrunning professionals, and one for everyone else). A week ago we were amused to see that the SEC charged the NYSE with a wristslap, one for $5 million dollars and where the NYSE naturally neither admitted nor denied guilt, accusing it of doing precisely what we said it, and all others, had been doing for years: namely getting paid by wealthy traders, those using the prop data feed OpenBook Ultra and other paid systems, to create and perpetuate a two-tiered market, all the while the regulator, i.e., the SEC was paid to look the other way. This action was nothing but a desperate, and futile, attempt to regain some investor confidence in the market. It has failed, and since said "enforcement" action has done nothing to restore confidence, expect to see more exchanges slapped with fines for actively perpetuating latency arbitrage opportunities for "some" clients. Well, since the SEC will be desperate to come up with more means of "restoring credibility" of both the market and its regulator, another exchange it may want to look at is the NASDAQ, which as Nanex demonstrates, may well have been engaging in comparable (most likely not pro-bono) latency arbitrage benefiting some: those paying for its direct feed aka TotalView, and thus not harming others, or those relying on the Consolidated Feed (UQDF) for data dissemination.

Actually not really, but all one can do is laugh since in some centrally planned parallel universe, the entire world entering manufacturing contraction translates into a 4 year (and just shy of all time) stock market high...

Now that oil’s price revolution – a process that took ten years to complete – is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin? Most of the structural changes that carried oil from the old equilibrium price of $25 to the new equilibrium price of $100 (average of Brent and WTIC) unfolded in the 2002-2008 period. During that time, both the difficult realities of geology and a paradigm shift in awareness worked their way into the market, as a new tranche of oil resources, entirely different in cost and structure than the old oil resources, came online. The mismatch between the old price and the emergent price was resolved incrementally at first, and finally by a super-spike in 2008. However, once the dust settled on the ensuing global recession and financial crisis, oil then found its way to its new range between $90 and $110. Here, supply from a new set of resources and the continuance of less-elastic demand from the developing world have created moderate price stability. Prices above $90 are enough to bring on new supply, thus keeping production levels slightly flat. And yet those same prices roughly balance the continued decline of oil consumption in the OECD, which offsets the continued advance of consumption in the non-OECD. If oil prices can’t fall that much because of the cost of marginal supply and overall flat global production, and if oil prices can’t rise that much because of restrained Western economies, what set of factors will take the oil price outside of its current envelope?

But now, there is no deus ex machina

The 15 Rules of Web Disruption

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