Category: zerohedge

…so goes global GDP…?

 

 

(h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer)

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Xmen-yWCkWo/story01.htm Tyler Durden

On October 15, two weeks after the end of the third quarter, David Tepper appeared on CNBC for his semi-annual stock pumpfest, most memorable for his suggestion that a 20x P/E multiple on the S&P was perfectly acceptable. Which would suggest Tepper was very bullish on risk. Which would suggest buying more stocks, not selling. Yet selling is precisely what he did between June 30 and September 30 according to his just released 13F. Specifically, after having a total long equity AUM of $6.9 billion at the end of the second quarter, the Appaloosian lowered the dollar value of his AUM by nearly 10%, to $6.3 billion as of September 30. So what did he liqudate? Here are his biggest liquidations:

• Comcast ($61 million, 1.5MM shares)
• Microsoft ($48 million, 1.4MM shares)
• Weatherford ($31 million, 2.3MM shraes)
• NetApp ($24 million, 640K shares)

Just as notable is what he sold partially, of which his $665 million cut (4.3 million shares) in the SPY ETF is certainly quite dramatic. Other notable sales.

• Bank of America: sold $51 million, or 4.1MM shares
• Broadcom: sold $55 million, 1.2MM shares
• Hertz: sold $40 million, 1.5MM shares
• Sandisk: sold $39 million, 635K shares
• Carnival: sold $32 million, 876K shares
• Google: sold $18 million, 20k shares

And so on. What did he buy to offset all these sales? His new stakes are as follows:

• Freeport McMoRan: $58 million, 1.75mm shares
• Ingredeon: $20 million, 297k shares
• Community Health: $8.7 million, 210k shares
• Tenet healthcare: $8.7 million, 210k shares

and…

• a flyer for $6.5 million or 737k shares in JCPenney, in which he is nursing a substantial loss so far.

Tepper’s complete latest holdings are shown below, sorted by notional as of Sept 30. New positions in green.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/vy4X8o1xtEE/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Tim Price of The Price of Everything blog,

“No warning can save people determined to grow suddenly rich.” – Lord Overstone.

We have seen a confluence of events that suggests we may be reaching the terminal point of the financial markets merry-go-round – that point just before the ride stops suddenly and unexpectedly and the passengers are thrown from their seats. Having waited with increasing concern to see what might transpire from the gridlocked US political system, the market was rewarded with a few more months’ grace before the next agonising debate about raising the US debt ceiling. There was widespread relief, if not outright jubilation. Stock markets rose, in some cases to all-time highs. But let there be no misunderstanding on this point: the US administration is hopelessly bankrupt. (As are those of the UK, most of western Europe, and Japan.)

The market preferred to sit tight on the ride, for the time being. Three professors were awarded what was widely misreported as ‘the Nobel prize in economics’ for mutually contradictory research. What they actually received was the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’, which is not quite the same thing. But then economics is not a science, and Eugene Fama’s ‘efficient market hypothesis’ is not just empirically wrong, but dangerously so. History, it would seem, is clearing the decks. Perhaps the most intriguing development of the week was the news that Neil Woodford would soon be retiring from his role managing £33 billion of other people’s money at Invesco Perpetual to start up his own business. It was widely reported that Mr. Woodford nursed growing frustration at the short-termism of the financial services industry. We will return to this theme.

One of the sadder stories in the history of investment management is that of Mr. Tony Dye. The following extract is taken from his obituary in The Independent:

Tony Dye was one of Britain’s best known fund managers, becoming a household name in the late 1990s due to his controversial opinions about the outlook for global stock markets. At a time when markets were soaring, Dye insisted they were overvalued and on the verge of a crash – a view which put him at odds with most other investors at the time and earned him the nickname “Dr Doom”.

 

As early as 1995, as the FTSE 100 was approaching 4,000 points, Dye began to make the case that markets were too expensive. At the time, he was the chief investment officer for Phillips & Drew, one of Britain’s biggest asset management firms, and by 1996 he had begun to move large sums of clients’ money out of equities and into cash.

 

In the years that followed, however, stock markets continued to soar, driven by the technology boom. But Dye stuck to his guns, avoiding the high-growth, high-risk internet stocks, maintaining large positions in cash, and consequently ensuring that Phillips & Drew’s funds significantly underperformed their rivals. By 1999, the firm was ranked 66th out of 67 for performance amongst Britain’s institutional fund managers, and was haemorrhaging clients – and in February the following year, just weeks after the FTSE had broken through 7,000 points for the first time, Dye was sacked.

 

Days later, his prophesy finally came true. Markets collapsed, and settled into a three year slump, which saw more than 50 per cent wiped off the value of global stock markets.

Neil Woodford’s apparent concerns are well placed. There is a grotesque mismatch between the set-up of institutional asset managers and what is in the best interests of their end clients, the individual members of the public who pay their fees. The investment fund marketplace is grotesquely oversupplied. There is far too much, to use the dismal phrase, product. The problem is exacerbated by perhaps inevitable weaknesses in psychology – both on the part of the manager, and on the part of the investor. Stress points abound throughout the chain. The investment fund world is hopelessly balkanised, and brimming over with a degree of product specialisation utterly unwarranted by investors’ real needs. The fund management industry is a perpetual production line of novelty, or rather an endless rehash of the same old ideas. The point of absurdity was reached and surpassed when there were more mutual funds listed on the New York Stock Exchange than there were common stocks with which to populate them. The industry is a monstrous hydra, busily consuming its own, and its investors’, capital. New funds are launched daily. Failing older funds are quietly tidied away, merged, or destroyed. They are ‘uninvented’.

Alison Smith and Stephen Foley covered the news of Neil Woodford’s resignation for the Financial Times. They cited the FT’s own John Kay, who carried out a review of UK equity markets last year, and who said,

The short-term horizon is basically introduced by the intermediary sector.. Pension trustees [for example] are told they should keep reviewing managers, while retail investors get constant invitations to trade from independent financial advisers [for example] and the platforms set up to enable them to do so.

As they suggest, Neil Woodford’s past success means that raising money for his new business is unlikely to be much of a struggle. “But imagine the hurdles in the way of a manager who would like to purse long-term strategies but is just starting out.” In the words of Professor Kay,

How easy would Warren Buffett find it to set up now?

We have not been immune to the demands of clients frustrated at the performance of diversified portfolios lagging the broader equity markets (although this explicit benchmarking against stocks was never a mandate to which we subscribed). We struggle, in some cases, to make sufficiently clear our concerns about broader market valuation, or just as importantly the gravity of the global financial situation (including a potential QE-driven currency crisis), which makes a wholehearted commitment to the stock market in late 2013 seem to us a risky strategy. So where, if anywhere, does the fault lie? Sometimes it is not just asset managers who should be accused of being short-termist, or of missing the big picture.

Our thesis has been consistent for five years now. We believe we are at the tail end of a 40-years’ and counting experiment in money and the constant expansion of credit. This experiment is not ending well. Because government money, unbacked and unchecked as it now is by anything of tangible value, can be created at will, it has been. What is extraordinary is that despite trillions of dollars / pounds / yen of stimulus, there are few visible signs of what we would call inflation, in anything other than the prices of financial assets themselves.

We are living through a historic period of global currency debasement. The neo-Keynesian money-printers who dominate the world’s central banks have ‘won’ the debate, but are now scratching their heads, looking in vain for the economic recovery
that they were expecting all those trillions to have bought. They will continue to look in vain, because money creation and true wealth creation are polar opposites. As portfolio manager Tony Deden has asked,

If cheaper currency is the source of wealth, where has Bangladesh gone wrong? If cheaper money means economic prosperity, why not just print as much as we can and give it out to everyone? We have become fools. The customers know nothing and the advisers know even less. And then we have the idiot economists – the neo-classical Keynesian variety with solutions to problems they did not even anticipate; solutions that have, in fact, been long discredited. And so we lurch from crisis to crisis, eating our meagre capital in the hopes of becoming rich in money. It is a pity.

Those words were written four years ago. The printing presses have been run to exhaustion ever since. So far they have bought us an inflationary rally in the prices of financial assets, and not much else. It has been a lousy time for anyone focused on the disciplined and genuinely diversified pursuit of capital preservation in real terms (more recently, for anyone seeking to escape the inflationary insanity via the honest money that is gold). We have not, to any significant extent, participated in the ‘phony rally’. But then we are playing a longer game than most of our peers. Round and round and round she goes; where she stops, nobody knows. Fund manager Sebastian Lyon recently quoted another celebrated fund manager, Jean-Marie Eveillard:

I would rather lose half of my shareholders than half of my shareholders’ money.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/obCgZTZOllU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Tim Price of The Price of Everything blog,

“No warning can save people determined to grow suddenly rich.” – Lord Overstone.

We have seen a confluence of events that suggests we may be reaching the terminal point of the financial markets merry-go-round – that point just before the ride stops suddenly and unexpectedly and the passengers are thrown from their seats. Having waited with increasing concern to see what might transpire from the gridlocked US political system, the market was rewarded with a few more months’ grace before the next agonising debate about raising the US debt ceiling. There was widespread relief, if not outright jubilation. Stock markets rose, in some cases to all-time highs. But let there be no misunderstanding on this point: the US administration is hopelessly bankrupt. (As are those of the UK, most of western Europe, and Japan.)

The market preferred to sit tight on the ride, for the time being. Three professors were awarded what was widely misreported as ‘the Nobel prize in economics’ for mutually contradictory research. What they actually received was the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’, which is not quite the same thing. But then economics is not a science, and Eugene Fama’s ‘efficient market hypothesis’ is not just empirically wrong, but dangerously so. History, it would seem, is clearing the decks. Perhaps the most intriguing development of the week was the news that Neil Woodford would soon be retiring from his role managing £33 billion of other people’s money at Invesco Perpetual to start up his own business. It was widely reported that Mr. Woodford nursed growing frustration at the short-termism of the financial services industry. We will return to this theme.

One of the sadder stories in the history of investment management is that of Mr. Tony Dye. The following extract is taken from his obituary in The Independent:

Tony Dye was one of Britain’s best known fund managers, becoming a household name in the late 1990s due to his controversial opinions about the outlook for global stock markets. At a time when markets were soaring, Dye insisted they were overvalued and on the verge of a crash – a view which put him at odds with most other investors at the time and earned him the nickname “Dr Doom”.

 

As early as 1995, as the FTSE 100 was approaching 4,000 points, Dye began to make the case that markets were too expensive. At the time, he was the chief investment officer for Phillips & Drew, one of Britain’s biggest asset management firms, and by 1996 he had begun to move large sums of clients’ money out of equities and into cash.

 

In the years that followed, however, stock markets continued to soar, driven by the technology boom. But Dye stuck to his guns, avoiding the high-growth, high-risk internet stocks, maintaining large positions in cash, and consequently ensuring that Phillips & Drew’s funds significantly underperformed their rivals. By 1999, the firm was ranked 66th out of 67 for performance amongst Britain’s institutional fund managers, and was haemorrhaging clients – and in February the following year, just weeks after the FTSE had broken through 7,000 points for the first time, Dye was sacked.

 

Days later, his prophesy finally came true. Markets collapsed, and settled into a three year slump, which saw more than 50 per cent wiped off the value of global stock markets.

Neil Woodford’s apparent concerns are well placed. There is a grotesque mismatch between the set-up of institutional asset managers and what is in the best interests of their end clients, the individual members of the public who pay their fees. The investment fund marketplace is grotesquely oversupplied. There is far too much, to use the dismal phrase, product. The problem is exacerbated by perhaps inevitable weaknesses in psychology – both on the part of the manager, and on the part of the investor. Stress points abound throughout the chain. The investment fund world is hopelessly balkanised, and brimming over with a degree of product specialisation utterly unwarranted by investors’ real needs. The fund management industry is a perpetual production line of novelty, or rather an endless rehash of the same old ideas. The point of absurdity was reached and surpassed when there were more mutual funds listed on the New York Stock Exchange than there were common stocks with which to populate them. The industry is a monstrous hydra, busily consuming its own, and its investors’, capital. New funds are launched daily. Failing older funds are quietly tidied away, merged, or destroyed. They are ‘uninvented’.

Alison Smith and Stephen Foley covered the news of Neil Woodford’s resignation for the Financial Times. They cited the FT’s own John Kay, who carried out a review of UK equity markets last year, and who said,

The short-term horizon is basically introduced by the intermediary sector.. Pension trustees [for example] are told they should keep reviewing managers, while retail investors get constant invitations to trade from independent financial advisers [for example] and the platforms set up to enable them to do so.

As they suggest, Neil Woodford’s past success means that raising money for his new business is unlikely to be much of a struggle. “But imagine the hurdles in the way of a manager who would like to purse long-term strategies but is just starting out.” In the words of Professor Kay,

How easy would Warren Buffett find it to set up now?

We have not been immune to the demands of clients frustrated at the performance of diversified portfolios lagging the broader equity markets (although this explicit benchmarking against stocks was never a mandate to which we subscribed). We struggle, in some cases, to make sufficiently clear our concerns about broader market valuation, or just as importantly the gravity of the global financial situation (including a potential QE-driven currency crisis), which makes a wholehearted commitment to the stock market in late 2013 seem to us a risky strategy. So where, if anywhere, does the fault lie? Sometimes it is not just asset managers who should be accused of being short-termist, or of missing the big picture.

Our thesis has been consistent for five years now. We believe we are at the tail end of a 40-years’ and counting experiment in money and the constant expansion of credit. This experiment is not ending well. Because government money, unbacked and unchecked as it now is by anything of tangible value, can be created at will, it has been. What is extraordinary is that despite trillions of dollars / pounds / yen of stimulus, there are few visible signs of what we would call inflation, in anything other than the prices of financial assets themselves.

We are living through a historic period of global currency debasement. The neo-Keynesian money-printers who dominate the world’s central banks have ‘won’ the debate, but are now scratching their heads, looking in vain for the economic recovery that they were expecting all those trillions to have bought. They will continue to look in vain, because money creation and true wealth creation are polar opposites. As portfolio manager Tony Deden has asked,

If cheaper currency is the source of wealth, where has Bangladesh gone wrong? If cheaper money means economic prosperity, why not just print as much as we can and give it out to everyone? We have become fools. The customers know nothing and the advisers know even less. And then we have the idiot economists – the neo-classical Keynesian variety with solutions to problems they did not even anticipate; solutions that have, in fact, been long discredited. And so we lurch from crisis to crisis, eating our meagre capital in the hopes of becoming rich in money. It is a pity.

Those words were written four years ago. The printing presses have been run to exhaustion ever since. So far they have bought us an inflationary rally in the prices of financial assets, and not much else. It has been a lousy time for anyone focused on the disciplined and genuinely diversified pursuit of capital preservation in real terms (more recently, for anyone seeking to escape the inflationary insanity via the honest money that is gold). We have not, to any significant extent, participated in the ‘phony rally’. But then we are playing a longer game than most of our peers. Round and round and round she goes; where she stops, nobody knows. Fund manager Sebastian Lyon recently quoted another celebrated fund manager, Jean-Marie Eveillard:

I would rather lose half of my shareholders than half of my shareholders’ money.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/obCgZTZOllU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Despite a 10% collapse in CSCO (which apparently is not a bellwhether anymore at all) – notching a mere 18 points off the Dow, Yellen's confirmation of everything we thought we knew (and bad macro data) was enough to send the S&P and Dow to new all-time highs. Treasuries rallied 2bps (5-8bps on the week) and gold lifted back to unchanged on the week. VIX limped lower. On the day, the USD closed higher (thanks to JPY weakness supporting stocks) but was lower from early highs. Credit markets rallied very modestly but remain hugely divergent in this supposed QEeen-fueled surge. And on it goes…

 

Stocks are unstoppable… credit not so much…

 

The Dow, Nasdaq totally ignored CSCO – so old school – and roared again…

 

Some context off the debt-ceiling lows…

 

and across the sectors…

 

Gold lurched begrudgingly today – back to unchanged on the week…

 

as Treasuries rallied (10Y back to 2.69%)

 

Before everyone gets too excited – we have seen this rampacious levitation 4 times this year now and each time it reached this pace – we turned lower…

 

You think this is funny… does it amuse you?

 

Charts: Bloomberg

 

Bonus Chart: It all makes sense somewhere…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/cw33tsj9-Mw/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Despite a 10% collapse in CSCO (which apparently is not a bellwhether anymore at all) – notching a mere 18 points off the Dow, Yellen's confirmation of everything we thought we knew (and bad macro data) was enough to send the S&P and Dow to new all-time highs. Treasuries rallied 2bps (5-8bps on the week) and gold lifted back to unchanged on the week. VIX limped lower. On the day, the USD closed higher (thanks to JPY weakness supporting stocks) but was lower from early highs. Credit markets rallied very modestly but remain hugely divergent in this supposed QEeen-fueled surge. And on it goes…

 

Stocks are unstoppable… credit not so much…

 

The Dow, Nasdaq totally ignored CSCO – so old school – and roared again…

 

Some context off the debt-ceiling lows…

 

and across the sectors…

 

Gold lurched begrudgingly today – back to unchanged on the week…

 

as Treasuries rallied (10Y back to 2.69%)

 

Before everyone gets too excited – we have seen this rampacious levitation 4 times this year now and each time it reached this pace – we turned lower…

 

You think this is funny… does it amuse you?

 

Charts: Bloomberg

 

Bonus Chart: It all makes sense somewhere…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/cw33tsj9-Mw/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

“It’s a big club…. and you ain’t in it.”

 

– George Carlin

Irony: The woman who is set to become one of the most powerful people in the world begins her confirmation hearing today. And few people have ever even heard of her.

It must be a byproduct of the government-controlled education system; people still think they live in a free country with a representative democracy. It’s anything but.

Voting, elections, etc. are all just illusions to make people think that they have some influence in society.

A tiny elite orchestrates the whole system. And one of the most influential conductors is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a post about to be taken over by Janet Yellen.

Since most people have no idea how central banking really works, her confirmation hearing today is just a footnote.

Even people who are otherwise financially sophisticated simply trust that the men behind the curtain know what they’re doing.

This is quite strange when you consider that central bankers have nearly total control over the economy.

In their sole discretion, they are able to set interest rates, conjure money out of thin air, finance trillion-dollar government deficits, bail out commercial banks, etc.

And through these tools, they have the power to manipulate the prices of just about anything, from the Google stock to real estate in Thailand to turnips in Sri Lanka.

For the last several years, the US central bank has set the example for the rest of the world in aggressively using their policy tools.

Most significantly, they have unabashedly printed money in unprecedented quantities. And this has not been without consequence.

For some, the effects have been beneficial.

Rapid expansion of the money supply has pushed asset prices up all over the world. Stocks. Bonds. Many commodities. US Farmland. Artwork. Fine wines. Just about every asset class imaginable is near its all-time high.

People who are already wealthy have the available funds to invest in these markets. So their wealth has grown even more– exponentially.

The middle class, on the other hand, is experiencing an entirely different effect of money printing– retail price inflation.

And anyone who has been to a gas station, airport, university, doctor’s office, grocery store, etc. over the last few years understands this phenomenon very well.

A typical middle class family has little excess cash to invest after paying for rapidly increasing living expenses. Food. Fuel. Mortgage. Insurance. Etc.

And whatever wages or savings they have are being eaten away by inflation. So while the wealthy are getting wealthier exponentially, the middle class is actually getting poorer.

This explains why the wealth gap in the Land of the Free is the largest since 1929 at the start of the Great Depression.

Central bankers are responsible for much of this. In conjuring money out of thin air, they are benefitting one segment of society at the expense of another.

And with Janet Yellen at the head of the Fed, you can be sure that nothing is going to change.

Yellen has made it clear that she will continue to print unlimited quantities of money despite overwhelming data that such actions are ineffective and destructive for the the majority of the population.

Kyle Reese from the first Terminator movie sums this up rather succinctly here:

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/IbfuKyaELzc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

“It’s a big club…. and you ain’t in it.”

 

– George Carlin

Irony: The woman who is set to become one of the most powerful people in the world begins her confirmation hearing today. And few people have ever even heard of her.

It must be a byproduct of the government-controlled education system; people still think they live in a free country with a representative democracy. It’s anything but.

Voting, elections, etc. are all just illusions to make people think that they have some influence in society.

A tiny elite orchestrates the whole system. And one of the most influential conductors is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a post about to be taken over by Janet Yellen.

Since most people have no idea how central banking really works, her confirmation hearing today is just a footnote.

Even people who are otherwise financially sophisticated simply trust that the men behind the curtain know what they’re doing.

This is quite strange when you consider that central bankers have nearly total control over the economy.

In their sole discretion, they are able to set interest rates, conjure money out of thin air, finance trillion-dollar government deficits, bail out commercial banks, etc.

And through these tools, they have the power to manipulate the prices of just about anything, from the Google stock to real estate in Thailand to turnips in Sri Lanka.

For the last several years, the US central bank has set the example for the rest of the world in aggressively using their policy tools.

Most significantly, they have unabashedly printed money in unprecedented quantities. And this has not been without consequence.

For some, the effects have been beneficial.

Rapid expansion of the money supply has pushed asset prices up all over the world. Stocks. Bonds. Many commodities. US Farmland. Artwork. Fine wines. Just about every asset class imaginable is near its all-time high.

People who are already wealthy have the available funds to invest in these markets. So their wealth has grown even more– exponentially.

The middle class, on the other hand, is experiencing an entirely different effect of money printing– retail price inflation.

And anyone who has been to a gas station, airport, university, doctor’s office, grocery store, etc. over the last few years understands this phenomenon very well.

A typical middle class family has little excess cash to invest after paying for rapidly increasing living expenses. Food. Fuel. Mortgage. Insurance. Etc.

And whatever wages or savings they have are being eaten away by inflation. So while the wealthy are getting wealthier exponentially, the middle class is actually getting poorer.

This explains why the wealth gap in the Land of the Free is the largest since 1929 at the start of the Great Depression.

Central bankers are responsible for much of this. In conjuring money out of thin air, they are benefitting one segment of society at the expense of another.

And with Janet Yellen at the head of the Fed, you can be sure that nothing is going to change.

Yellen has made it clear that she will continue to print unlimited quantities of money despite overwhelming data that such actions are ineffective and destructive for the the majority of the population.

Kyle Reese from the first Terminator movie sums this up rather succinctly here:

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/IbfuKyaELzc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Today the treasury auctioned off 16bln 30yr bonds at 1pm (ET).  This occurred during a fairly volatile backdrop.  Janet Yellen was answering questions from the Senate for much of the “setup” period.  Her testimony was fairly QE – supportive, and so the bond market rallied during her entire testimony.  Then we had a 3.5bln 10yr POMO @ 11am (ET) 2 hours before the auction.  This was the pre-auction crescendo that many day traders are familiar with.

Bonds rallied right into the 20minute period after the 10yr POMO in a crescendo of volume….and then fell back down to the overnight VWAP after the 1pm 30yr auction tailed 1.5 basis points.

(pictured are 30yr UB futures vs inverse DX futures)

I suggested selling bonds at 11:20am this morning into the crescendo of volume, and covering after the auction.  As a trader, i couldn’t really think of anything else to do.

Up until the 10yr POMO, the 10/30 curve was stable at 108 basis points.   This indicated that a concentrated short setup had not taken place.  However, after 11:20am, 30yr bonds started to underperform (both outright price and on the curve), indicating that the setup (selling bonds pre-auction) had begun.  I thought the timing of this setup selling very coincidental.

While the treasury market is still generally strong post-auction (the belly inparticular), the fact that the 30yr auction tailed indicates that the large short base pre-Yellen speech release has mostly covered and the market should be fairly stable in the current price range.

 (UST yield change on day)

Typically, the treasury market builds a concession pre-auction, and actual investors of US Treasury paper buy these auctions to get long.  Today that is a scary trade (getting long) because the market has repriced higher after Yellen’s early-release speech last night.

As a day trader, i won’t participate in that trade…but as a portfolio manager, i’m sure that many are.
 With Janet Yellen at the helm, its clear that the economy will need to clearly demonstrate deep economic strength before she will consider reducing QE…and that may be a long time away.

If you are interested in this type of bond market commentary intraday, in addition to following along with the trades that i am doing in the market, then i suggest trying out my paypal subscription twitter feed.

-GovtTrader

 

http://govttrader.blogspot.com/

https://twitter.com/GovtTrader

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/hGIJyK_2q8o/story01.htm govttrader

Today’s release of the 2013 edition of the Global Shadow Banking Monitoring Report by the Financial Stability Board doesn’t contain anything that frequent readers of this site don’t know already on a topic we have covered since 2009. It does however have a notable sidebar which explains the magic of “fractional repo banking” – a topic made popular in late 2011 following the collapse of MF Global – when it was revealed that as part of the Primary Dealer’s operating model, a core part of the business was participating in UK-based repo chains in which the collateral could be recycled effectively without limit and without a haircut, affording Jon Corzine’s organization virtually unlimited leverage starting with a modest initial margin.

Naturally, any product that can allow participants infinite leverage is something that all “sophisticated” market participants not only know about, but abuse on a regular basis. The fact that this “unfractional repo banking” is at the heart of the unregulated $71.2 trillion shadow banking system, the less the general public knows about it the better.

Which is why we were happy that the FSB was kind enough to explain in two short paragraphs and one even simpler chart, just how the aggregate leverage for the participants in even the simplest repo chain promptly becomes exponential, far above the “sum of the parts”, and approaches infinity in virtually no time.

From the FSB:

As a simple illustration of the way in which repo transactions can combine to produce adverse effects on the system that can be larger than the sum of their parts, suppose that investor A borrows cash for a short period of time from investor B and posts securities as collateral. Investor A could use some of that cash to purchase additional securities, post those as further collateral with investor B to receive more cash, and so on multiple times. The result of this series of ‘leveraging transactions’ is that investor A ends up posting more collateral in total with investor B than they initially owned outright. Consequently, small changes in the value of those securities have a larger effect on the resilience of both counterparties. In turn, investor B could undertake a similar series of financing transactions with investor C, re-using the collateral it has taken from investor A, and so on.

 

Exhibit A2-5 mechanically traces out the aggregate leverage that can arise in this example. Even with relatively conservative assumptions, some configurations of repo transactions boost aggregate leverage alongside the stock of money-like liabilities and interconnectedness in ways that might materially increase systemic risk. For example, even with a relatively high collateral haircut of 10%, a three-investor chain can achieve a leverage multiplier of roughly 2-4, which is in the same ball park as the financial leverage of the hedge fund sector globally. It is therefore imperative from a risk assessment perspective that adequate data are available. Trade repositories, as proposed by FSB Workstream 5, could be very helpful in this regard.

 

So… three participants result in 4x leverage; four: in roughly 6x, and so on. Of course, these are conservative estimates: in the real, collateral-strapped world, the amount of collateral reuse, and thus the number of participants is orders of magnitude higher. Which means that after just a few turns of rehypothecation, leverage approaches infinity. Needless to say, with infinite leverage, even the tiniest decline in asset values would result in a full wipe out of one collateral chain member, which then spreads like contagion, and destroys everyone else who has reused that particular collateral.

All of this, incidentally, explains why down days are now prohibited. Because with every risk increase, there is an additional turn of collateral re-use, and even more participants for whom the Mutual Assured Destruction of complete obliteration should the weakest link implode, becomes all too real.

That, in a nutshell, are the mechanics. As to the common sense implications of having an unregulated funding market which explicitly allows infinite leverage, we doubt we have to explain those to the non-Econ PhD readers out there.

Source

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/lEw8JkuqXPA/story01.htm Tyler Durden