In a surprising turn of credit “looseness”, total seasonally adjusted depository reserves increased by $84 billion compared to two weeks ago, and are now at $856 billion, the highest level since the end of May. It appears that contrary to all rhetoric to the contrary, banks are still unable and/or unwilling to lend or otherwise dispose of the ever increasing duffel bags full of cash in the basement.
The overall Monetary Base has followed the depository reserves fluctuations dollar for dollars, indicating the pure currency in circulation has not fluctuated much if at all: a year ago the non-depository reserve monetary base was $800 billion and it has barely budged to its current level of $878 billion.
In essence, the Fed’s plan to withdraw excess liquidity will have to wait at least until such time as consumers are again stupid enough to leverage themselves up, despite having reduced credit card limits and much more stringent banks. And the $84 billion increase in reserves is simply indicating that consumers are retrenching even more: expect the consumer saving rate to increase materially at the next data disclosure.
As we’ve seen – repeatedly – people aren’t particularly good at overcoming the behavioural biases built into our nature by evolution. There’s no real reason we should be – computing the statistical probability of an above average return on the stockmarket over a twenty year period wasn’t of much value for most of human history. This was partly because twenty years was more than the average lifespan of a proto-human but largely because no one had yet got around to inventing money or stockmarkets or stocks. Or ‘years’.
If these biases are inherent and cause us to do stupid things around finance we might expect that they’ll appear in other areas as well where humanity has only recently started to apply its higher cognitive functions. So it’s unsurprising that our basic intuitions about science are about as reliable as those we have about finance. To whit: not reliable at all.
Greek Geeks
Science has been around a lot longer than modern financial theory. The Ancient Greeks developed many concepts that aren’t out of place in the modern pantheon of university science faculties – atomic theory, planetary orbits and toga parties amongst them. Unfortunately they failed to marry their scientific insights to a stable economic system and much of their knowledge was lost for the best part of a millennium. The lesson being, presumably, that disenfranchising women and relying on slave labour is a poor way of building a stable society. Global corporations take note.
During that lost thousand years or so the only real legacy of Greek knowledge in the Western world was a smattering of Aristotle, who was a bloody good thinker but a bit weak on stuff like planetary motion and mathematics. Somewhere along the line Aristotle’s ideas got mixed up with Christianity and resulted in the odd position of the Catholic Church defining God’s word on the basis of the scientific writings of an atheistic Greek who died before Christ was born. We can blame Thomas Aquinas for that one.
The period known as the Renaissance – the rebirth – was marked by a remarkable rediscovery of Ancient Greek thought. Some of this came from the Muslim world, where many ideas and writings had been sustained through the European Dark Ages, and some of it from the
Credit markets were notably weak in August with HY underperforming IG, low beta deterioration, more curve inversion, and financials weaker, and all in the face of the continued rally in stocks. In the past we have seen credit anticipate and equity confirm – certainly credit markets are off their Utopian levels while stocks maintain them.
August was a fascinating month for the markets with lots of volatility, investing seemingly a binary decision of risk-on/risk-off, and everything becoming one trade – buy risky stuff or sell risky stuff. The dollar weakness/stock strength story continues to amaze but remember our recent point on how this relationship is becoming more and more asymmetric as the month wore on – this worries us considerably as increasingly aggressive dollar selling is required to jump start stocks.
Most notably, IG12 was over 8bps wider in August and HY12 68bps wider while stocks (S&P) managed to gain around 3%. Perhaps most notably, the USD was only marginally weaker, oil as good as unch (on the rolling front month contract), VIX flat, and gold a tad lower in price. 10Y TSYs were almost 8bps lower in yield (TSY buying and stock buying as corporate debt sold off?).
ExHVOL (our preferred trade) has performed very well as it widened over 12bps on the month to around 70bps and we note that indices in general underperformed intrinsics (which widened the skews in HY but narrowed in the rest).
IG12′s curve was flatter (more inverted) as we saw intrinsics steepen up quite considerably in 7s10s (or 5s10s) while 5s7s was pretty flat.
Thanks to AIG’s remarkable rally and strength in junk, high beta credits outperformed low beta dramatically but both were considerably wider on the month. Interestingly (at least for us) the widest 5 names (CIT/AIG/ILFC/TXT/HIG) in IG12 at 07/31 were the major outperformers in August as dispersion dropped dramatically in IG and these names alone kept IG intrinsics almost 7bps tighter on the month.
CONSumers were the month’s worst performers as M, JCP, and FO were around 50bps wider. TMT was close behind with CMCSA and TWX worst as ENRG and INDUstrials were about the same but considerably wider. Financials outperformed non-financials on the month but the tails were waht helped the most as GS and MS were considerably weaker in credit (even as their stocks held up). BAC, COF, and WFC were…
The snare drum you hear in the background is the musical prelude to a big shift in currencies. If, as I anticipate, the EUR/USD starts to tumble (while, naturally, the dollar soars), we’ll have everything we need for equities to start falling to pieces.
One of the charts from EWI’s Short-Term Update, shown below, tells the story superbly. Notice how the slope (err, not "Slope" slope, but the regular slope), represented by the series of diagonal lines, gets decreasingly steep. This implies to me a tipping point that has either taken place or will take place in the near future.
I would also add that today is the first day in a while that the big profits that showed up in my account at the opening bell stuck around for the entire day. The only short position I closed was FXP, early in the morning; otherwise, I’m still short virtually across the board.
I’ll probably do a post later tonight. I need to – what else? – catch up on my charts.
Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can’t, because there isn’t one. And that’s the problem.
America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then another 10 million to spark demand over the next decade. That’s 15 million to 17 million new jobs. In the 1990s, the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs (a rate of 2.2 million per year), so we know it can be done. Between 2000 and the end of 2007 (the beginning of the current recession), however, the economy created new jobs at a rate of 900,000 a year, so we know it isn’t doing it now. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key source of fuel—critical mass, basic scientific research.
Even bears need a stimulant to get in their act going. It wasn’t a disastrous day but it wasn’t a good way to end the month given the sour China note. The new maxim may be: “when China catches a cold the rest of the world gets the flu”. Of course this would be a substitution for what used to begin “the US”. It may also be true to say, we just all have the flu, H1N1 or whatever.
My first business trip to China in the mid-1980s allowed me to witness ordinary citizens trading stocks on the street corner in front of the recently opened stock exchange. It was fun to watch and, if you’re a student of history, you’ll realize that’s the way things were done in London and the US more than a century ago.
More profound is the worries what a new bear market in Shanghai portends for markets where shockwaves are felt hardest—commodity, currency and emerging markets —all hit hard today.
Without posting it until the end of the commentary as usual, let’s look at the Shanghai CSI 300 Index right away. It’s the most popular of all the Chinese indexes. It’s important to remember that the constituents may have little to do with popular FXI (FSTSE Xinhua 25 Index ETF) but certainly the index has a psychological impact.
First the daily view with my annotations that include an RSI (Relative Strength Index), two moving averages, candlesticks (for visual effect) and DeMark Indicators. In the blue circles you’ll two occasions where the RSI recently has slipped below 30 indicating severely oversold conditions. Also, note DeMark counts reaching 9 sequential readings heralding some trend exhaustion both on the upside and downside. I’ve also drawn two orange support lines where I think we could find support to work off the oversold RSI but it won’t take much in that regard.
Here is an entertaining video by Tim Hawkins called "The Government Can"
If you need an entertaining look on how the country is going to hell in a hand basket, that’s the one. It’s sure to make you laugh, although what he talks about in reality is no laughing matter.
It’s no secret that boomers fearing an underfunded retirement have sharply cut spending. However, it’s not just boomers cutting back. Consumer attitudes toward debt have changed across all age groups.
Baby boomers’ self-reported average daily spending of $64 in 2009 is down sharply from an average of $98 in 2008. But baby boomers — the largest generational group of Americans — are not alone in pulling back on their consumption, as all generations show significant declines from last year. Generation X has reported the greatest spending on average in both years, and is averaging $71 per day so far in 2009, down from $110 in 2008.
Self-Reported Spending
Population Share By Age Group
The chart shows Boomers and Generation X are the two demographic largest groups. Spending is down by 34.7% among boomers and 35.4% in Generation X. Spending is down by 33.7% in generation Y, the third largest demographic group. That is a remarkably consistent decline in spending.
Spending by the "Greatest Generation" is down a whopping 44% but that group only constitutes 5% of the population.
Here are some more interesting charts from the article.
Annual Incomes – Boomers vs. Generation X
Surprisingly, annual incomes are nearly identical for boomers and generation X. However, Generation Y income is dramatically less as the following chart shows.
Annual Incomes – Boomers vs. Generation Y
Bottom Line
Baby boomers have pulled back considerably on their spending this year, but they are not alone in doing so. Gallup finds significant declines among all generations in average reported daily spending in 2009 compared to 2008. Given that consumer spending is the primary engine of the U.S. economy, it’s not clear how much the economy can grow unless spending increases from its current low levels. But spending may not necessarily be the best course of action for baby boomers as they approach retirement age and prepare to rely on Social Security and their retirement savings as primary sources of income. Indeed, the two generations consisting largely of retirement-age Americans consistently show the lowest levels of reported spending.
I can add to those thoughts. Boomers and Generation X
That end of day ramp sure was predictable, huh? This market almost feels like a casino where the players have the edge….
China down 7%, U.S. down 0.7% today. China down 25% from the peak, U.S. down 1%. Remember when China was the reason for the recovery? Now U.S. investors are ignoring China as a leading indicator. We’ve seen this before though….
According to a recent article on Reuters, on Saturday Lou Jiwei, the chairman of the CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund, said at a conference on Saturday in response to a question about his expected performance: “It will not be too bad this year. Both China and America are addressing bubbles by creating more bubbles and we’re just taking advantage of that. So we can’t lose.”
In my last entry I noted that after the recent “green shoots” period, during time which it seemed hard to find anyone who was skeptical of our seeming ability to turn the corner on the crisis without actually having addressed any of the underlying imbalances, it was good to see that more and more analysts, and especially policymakers, had begun to worry again. President Hoover went down in a blaze with his “light at the end of the tunnel”, and of course one of my favorite stories of that time is his response in June 1930 to a delegation requesting a public works program to help speed the recovery: “Gentleman, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over.”
As I see it the more policymakers worry, the better. This crisis is far from over. Until we know how the continued adjustment in US household consumption and debt will evolve, and how this adjustment will play out in China’s own changing consumption rate – most importantly whether it will complement the fiscal and credit expansion embarked upon by Beijing or, as I believe, conflict enormously with it – the crisis won’t be over. We need policymakers to resist the green-shoots nonsense and to worry about what happens when fiscal, monetary and credit tools stop working.
Although I thoroughly disagree with the “So we can’t lose” part of Mr. Lou’s statement – I have been a trader for too long to hear those words with anything but the deepest dread, and I am sure he didn’t intend the way it read – it is nonetheless interesting to me that by now skepticism is so widespread that a major investor can even propose our inability to work through the imbalances as a reasonable investment strategy.
We need skepticism. For one thing it has caused Beijing increasing worry about the risks of continuing to extend…
Jobless claims improve while leading indicators decline in today’s economic report card
by Wall Street Sector Selector Staff
Weekly jobless claims declined to 424,000 from last week’s 432, 000 but stubbornly stayed above the all important 400,000 level for another week.
August Leading Indicators came in at +0.3% compared to 0.5% for July, as the economy continues registering weakness.
Good news came from July Home Prices which rose to +0.8% from the previously reported +0.7%.
But the biggest economic news of the week came yesterday when the Federal Reserve said it saw “significant downside risks to the economic outlook, including strains in global financial markets.”
Global stock markets responded negatively yesterday an...
Shares of Priceline.com Incorporated (NASDAQ: PCLN) are trading higher in the after-hours following the release of its Q1 earnings results. Currently, shares are up 2.74%, trading at $548.60; they closed the regular session down 0.67 %, at $533.97.
The company said that its Q1 EPS came in at $2.66 on revenues of $809.3 million; this compares to the Street's estimate of $2.46 per share on revenues of $779.5 million. Revenues rose 38.6% year over year.
"In the 1st quarter, the Group benefited from strong growth in our global hotel business, particularly at Booking.com and Agoda," said Jeffery H. Boyd, Priceline President and Chief Executive Officer.
He added, "Room nights booked grew by 55.8% and our international gross bookings grew by 79% compared to prior year...
The damage control to the Fukushima explosion reported earlier is coming fast and furious. According to CNN, "the explosion at an earthquake-damaged nuclear plant was not caused by damage to the nuclear reactor but by a pumping system that failed as crews tried to bring the reactor's temperature down, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Saturday. The next step for workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant will be to flood the reactor containment structure with sea water to bring the reactor's temperature down to safe levels, he said. The effort is expected to take two days." While the government is trying to play down the threat from the explosion, it has nonetheless double the evacuation zone radius from 10 to 20 kilometers: "Radiation levels have fallen since the explosion and there is no immediate danger, Edano said. But authorities were nevertheless expanding the evacuation ...
Note from dshort: I retired this chart series last summer in deference to my prefered inflation-adjusted series that aligns the S&P 500 2000 high with the Nikkei peak in 1989. However, I continue to receive requests for this version, despite the "V" shape of the the recovery since the March 2009 low. This chart series overlays the current S&P 500 with the L-shaped "recoveries" after the Dow Crash of 1929, the Nikkei 225 after Japan's 1989 bubble, and the post Tech Bubble NASDAQ. Click the chart below for a larger version and use the links to see various comparisons.
Top 5 RisersStockRatingAnalysisVLOSTRONGBUYAn increasingly positive growth rate of past earnings, along with improving expectations for long term growth, make Valero a good prospect for high returns.KROSTRONGBUYKronos Worldwide has been gaining recognition from analysts as a good canditate for achieving higher than expected earnings along with higher overall projected valuation.SFIBUYiStar is one of the top candidates projected to achieve both higher than previously projected earnings in the short run and a higher earnings growth rate in the long run.AMATSTRONGBUYApplied Materials has been...
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February is now past, and the Biotech Porfolio is loaded with winners and a miss (PLX). MRK is down a bit, but I expect that trade to recover, and one could be more agressive and double down on it, or play another round at the Jan13 $30 options for roughly the same price. Below is the summary, and note the grey boxes are ones that did not fill. I am still a fan of BMRN, and like DEPO as well. Now let's look at a few others.
Table 1. PSW Biotech Plays Since January 2011
 
Our newest play is Momenta Pharmaceuticals (MNTA), who is pursuing a three-part business model which includes complex generic equivalents in partnership with the Sandoz division of Novartis, proprietary compounds, and follow-on- biologics (FOB). It seems that this company is tied up in competition/litigation wit...
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Unreliable Science
During that lost thousand years or so the only real legacy of Greek knowledge in the Western world was a smattering of Aristotle, who was a bloody good thinker but a bit weak on stuff like planetary motion and mathematics. Somewhere along the line Aristotle’s ideas got mixed up with Christianity and resulted in the odd position of the Catholic Church defining God’s word on the basis of the scientific writings of an atheistic Greek who died before Christ was born. We can blame Thomas Aquinas for that one.
Courtesy of 
Courtesy of 
As I see it the more policymakers worry, the better. This crisis is far from over. Until we know how the continued adjustment in US household consumption and debt will evolve, and how this adjustment will play out in China’s own changing consumption rate – most importantly whether it will complement the fiscal and credit expansion embarked upon by Beijing or, as I believe, conflict enormously with it – the crisis won’t be over. We need policymakers to resist the green-shoots nonsense and to worry about what happens when fiscal, monetary and credit tools stop working.
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Chinese
Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(