OTC

Ronald Reagan would be turning in his grave, wouldn’t he? In what became known as the most anti-communist speech of all time given by Reagan in 1987 on the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the former President of the United States of America said that the Soviet Union was the ‘evil empire’.

Two days in Washington D.C. kept caterers busy but produced a 2,126 word communique long on slogans and short on anything actionable. The G-20 statement (below) can be boiled down simply, as we tweeted,

G-20 statement: "if we all lie, same as nobody lying"

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 19, 2013

And just to add one more embarrassing detail for them, while section 4 discusses "Japan's recent policy actions," not only does Canada's finance minister James Flaherty believe they "didn't discuss the Japanese Yen," but Japan's Kuroda believes, comments on 'misalignments', "were not meant for the BoJ."

And you thought this would stay in Ireland and Cyprus right? Keep hope alive. RBS bailout per UK taxpayer = £1,414 or €1,654 or $2,177. but they didn't tell you everything, did they?

How many important (or worse yet, systemically important) banks can fail to disclose pertinent debt info before it becomes evident that the tax payer/depositor/regulators/stress tester realizes they don't know the Irish banking system's true condition? 

Moments ago, ahead of tomorrow's 9:30 am Senate hearing on JP Morgan's 2012 attempt to corner the IG9 market through its London-based CIO office using depositor cash which as everyone now knows went horribly wrong, titled "JPMorgan Chase Whale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses,” the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has released its comprehensive 300 pages review of the London Whale fiasco. The report, in a nutshell, finds that both Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan lied and misled investors, regulators and Congress, that it forced its traders to hide growing losses, that it hid trades banned by the Volcker rule (just as we first said in April 2012 in "Why JPM's "Chief Investment Office" Is The World's Largest Prop Trading Desk: Fact And Fiction") and that JP Morgan may, by extension, be "too big to manage" or "too big to regulate" as Carl "Shitty Deal" Levin summarized.

If the last three days were spared an overnight ramp in US futures, today this has not been the case as the new carry pairs of choice, the USDJPY and EURJPY, have seen constant gradual levitation overnight, pushing the correlated US OTC markets higher and setting the stage for the tenth consecutive, and perfectly artificial, Dow Jones increase. It is notable just how broken the old direct EURUSD-ES correlation is in times when correlation desks can offset selling pressure by shorting Yen and obtain local funding. That said, even the USDJPY appears to have stalled out in the low/mid 96 range - it is unclear what the catalyst pushing the Yen much lower will be, as virtually all rhetorical ammunition used by the BOJ and its affiliates, has by now been well and truly used up, and the daily talkdown sessions are merely a regurgitation of previous talking points.

Yo Liz:  Subsidies for the zombie banks total more than $3 annually for every dollar in income reported by the industry... 

As Morpheus said to Neo in the film The Matrix:  You still think that is air you are breathing?

There are underlying options on the S&P 500 that trade on exchange or OTC (depending on size and strike and margin package - arb or outright). On top of that set of options lies a world of futures and options on a 'created' VIX (that are predicated on the implied vols of the underlying S&P options). And to top it all off - the wonderful world of Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) overlays various levered and unlevered short and long products for retail (and professionals) to speculate on (and some have their own compound options). As you can tell - there is a large amount of 'flow' impacting up and down the chain in this vol landscape.

The problem with “too-big-to-fail” is first and foremost the behavior of our beloved political leaders in Washington

Gold market analysts have a tougher job than other financial analysts.  It is more difficult to analyze the yellow metal than equities because quantitative measures such as yield, cash flows, balance sheet leverage, and growth rates that provide a fundamental basis for analysis do not exists for gold. The fundamentals of gold are the current purchasing power of money; expectations about the future purchasing power of money; the growth rates of various national money supplies; the volume of bad debts in the system; expected growth rates of bad debts; the attractiveness of other available investments; and the investor’s preference for consumption rather than investment.   These factors do not act directly on the gold price.  Instead, they are focused through the prism of investor preferences, which are not measurable.  The price is the ultimate measurement of how investors view these factors.   Gold presents a paradox: that which drives the price cannot be measured, that which can be measured does not drive the price.

"Jesse Litvak arranged trades for customers as part of his job as a managing director on the MBS desk at Jefferies.  Litvak would buy a MBS from one customer and sell it to another customer, but on many occasions he lied about the price at which his firm had bought the MBS so he could re-sell it to the other customer at a higher price and keep more money for the firm.  On other occasions, Litvak misled purchasers by creating a fictional seller to purport that he was arranging a MBS trade between customers when in reality he was just selling MBS out of his firm’s inventory at a higher price.  Because MBS are generally illiquid and difficult to price, it is particularly important for brokers to provide honest and accurate information. The SEC alleges that Litvak generated more than $2.7 million in additional revenue for Jefferies through his deceit.  His misconduct helped him improve his own standing at the firm, as his bonuses were determined in part by the amount of revenue he generated for the firm." 

It’s all a money game on Wall Street.

The saga of an American family centered around Kunta Kinte's roller-coaster life through freedom and slavery made Santiago Capital's Brent Johnson reflect on just how critical 'roots' are in many aspects of our lives. From anthropology and linguistics to the root of law in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, Johnson extends the analogy to precious metal derivatives exchanges rooted in trust and explains that money is not the root of all evil. While his political taunts and Keynesian antagonism is well worth the price of admission, it is the discussion of the 'manipulation and debasement of money' as the root of all evil that is key as the manager explains gold's centuries long avoidance of this Lenin- or Keynes-inspired comprehension of how governments can "confiscate wealth" and by a "process of inflation... can overturn the existing basis of society." Gold provides the roots or solid base on which economies have grown (or individuals stored value) for all of recorded history. His conclusion is key - a tree (currency) with no roots simply cannot stand for long and the market will eventually come to the same conclusion it has for the last 5000 years as the OTC derivative bubble implodes.

Aside from the occasional deranged FX algo which today has decided to take out all its pent up binary anger on the GBPUSD, everything else today is closed. Everything, except, of course, for InTrade which come holiday, rain or apocalypse, is a true OTC market and is open all the time 24/7, non stop. Of particular interest is InTrade's market on "The US debt limit to be raised before midnight ET 31 Dec 2012" which moments ago once again came closer to reflecting reality and not the clueless gibberish of "expert" political pundits, and plunged to a contract low 10.1% probability (and price) which considering the late stage in the game, and that at this point the Fiscal Cliff is beyond any 2012 resolution, let alone the debt ceiling, is 10.1% too high (as forecast here nearly two months ago). And like a true market, one can naked short on InTrade. So for all the habitual gamblers out there just itching for some global futures market to reopen somewhere: have at it (but mind the brief squeeze at the next appearance of the "we have a deal" rumor, only to be refuted by the sad political reality of this country moments later).