Category: zerohedge

Submitted by Lance Roberts of STA Wealth Management,

With the "inmates in charge of the asylum" during this holiday shortened trading week it seemed to be an apropriate opportunity to share a virtual cornucopia of topics to consider while enjoying the delicious delicacies, and subsequent tryptophan induced comas, of a traditional Thanksgiving.

As I discussed earlier this week in "30% Up Years: The Case For Cashing In:"

"If the markets rise to 1850 by the end of 2013, which I believe is entirely possible as managers chase performance, it will mark the 11th time in history the markets have attained that goal.  I have also notated that each 30% return year was also the beginning of a period of both declining rates of annualized returns and typically sideways markets.  It is also important to notice that some of the biggest negative annual returns eventually followed 30% up years."

1) Margin Debt Soars To New Record via Zerohedge

"The correlation between stock prices and margin debt continues to rise (to new records of exuberant "Fed's got our backs" hope) as NYSE member margin balances surge to new record highs. Relative to the NYSE Composite, this is the most "leveraged' investors have been since the absolute peak in Feb 2000. What is more worrisome, or perhaps not, is the ongoing collapse in investor net worth – defined as total free credit in margin accounts less total margin debt – which has hit what appears to be all-time lows (i.e. there's less left than ever before) which as we noted previously raised a "red flag" with Deutsche Bank. Relative to the 'economy' margin debt has only been higher at the very peak in 2000 and 2007 and was never sustained at this level for more than 2 months."

 

2) Thanking The Fed For Investors' Bounty via Bloomberg Businessweek

"Thanks to outgoing Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke and the nominee to replace him, Janet Yellen, and their colleagues taking down interest rates to near-zero five years ago and keeping them there—on top of the Fed's nearly $4 trillion of creative asset purchases—investors have enjoyed the restoration of more than $13 trillion in U.S. equity market value. That's called the multiplier effect. And it's also called remorse, if you were one of the record numbers who bolted stocks altogether and are scrambling to get back in now, after indexes have more than doubled. It's also called financial repression if you're a saver having to eat negative real rates on your hard-earned cash.

 

Any wonder why capital markets threw a summer temper tantrum merely on signaling (arguably) from the Fed that it could soon reduce the size of its asset purchases (not end them, mind you—much less hike interest rates). Either way, the lame-duck Bernanke Fed opted to hold off."

 

"If it shows what it appears to show," says University of Texas economics and government professor James Galbraith, "then it's not difficult to grasp why the Fed's tapering has acquired the habit of ever-receding into the future."

 

3) Need To Laugh, Read "Getting Back To Full Employment" via Forbes

"They say that laughter is the best medicine. If so, "Getting Back to Full Employment", a revised and updated book by economists Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein, might just be able to save Obamacare. Read it, and see if it doesn't make you laugh out loud.

 

Of course, Bernstein, at least, has experience in economics comedy writing. Along with Christina Romer, he wrote "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan," which was the blueprint for President Obama's 2009 "stimulus" program.

 

In their "Recovery" study, Romer and Bernstein confidently predicted that shoveling $862 billion of borrowed money into the gaping maws of various Democratic interest groups would prevent the unemployment rate from going above 8%, and would push joblessness down to 5% by, well, now.

 

As they say in text message land, ROTFLMAO! Adjusted to the labor force participation rate that Bernstein and Romer assumed in their study (that of December 2008), the unemployment rate peaked at 11.5% in mid-2011, and it was still at 11.4% last month.

Baker and Bernstein begin by waxing nostalgic over the year 2000, when America reached effective full employment. The official "U-3" unemployment rate bottomed out at 3.84% during April of that year, while a record-high 64.74% of working-age Americans had jobs.

 

If that was full employment, we are 15.8 million jobs distant from it now. On a full-time equivalent (FTE)
jobs basis, the shortfall is even worse: 16.6 million FTE jobs.

 

Unemployment and underemployment are not laughing matters. The humor is contained in Baker and Bernstein's bizarre ideas for getting America back to full employment. After extolling the glories of Bill Clinton's second term, they go on to recommend policies that are the exact opposites of the ones that worked so well during that period."

4) Goldman's Global Leading Indicator Collapses Into Slowdown via Advisor Analyst

"The best silver lining Goldman Sachs found when faced with the total and utter collapse in their global leading indicator swirlogram was – (probably) stabilizing. The only improving factor across all their global economic components was the US initial jobless claims (and that has been a farce wrapped in a debacle for 2 months of 'glitches'). Having led global industrial production for a few months, it seems the indicator is crashing back to reality as the summer's hopefulness is exsanguinated from hard and soft data around the world."

 

5) In Fed Policy, Exits May Be Harder To Hear via New York Times

"Is it time for the Federal Reserve to start its exit from the extraordinary set of policies it has pursued over the past few years? That crucial question is on the minds of the nation's central bankers, as well as the stock and bond traders who follow the Fed's every move.    

 

 

In her recent testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Janet L. Yellen, the eminently qualified nominee to lead the Fed, made clear she didn't think the time for an exit had come. With inflation running below the Fed target of 2 percent and continued weakness in the labor market, she argued, the economy needs all the help the central bank can provide. 

 

Many of the numbers back up that diagnosis. The unemployment rate is about three percentage points higher than it was seven years ago, before we got the first whiffs of the economy's financial problems. The employment-to-population ratio is about five percentage points lower, and it has not recovered much at all since the trough of the recession.

 

But that is only a small part of the story. A relevant measure is the employment-to-population ratio for those in the prime working age group —25 to 54. This statistic also shows the recession's lingering effects: the ratio declined to about 75 percent from 80 percent over the course of the recession, and has recovered to only about 76 percent today. So we have recovered only about a fifth of what we lost during the downturn.

 

These numbers indicate that there is still much slack, or unused potential, in the economy. In turn, this suggests that inflation is unlikely to become a problem anytime soon, so the Fed can delay its exit. But the labor market data are hard to interpret, because this recession has been so different from those before it.

 

How these conflicting signals are resolved will eventually determine the course of monetary policy. Because Ms. Yellen says the economy has a lot of slack, she isn't especially worried about inflation and isn't eager for the Fed to quit its stimulative policies. Many measures confirm her judgment, but this recession has been extraordinary, making historical norms hard to apply, and other statistics point to a different conclusion. Ms. Yellen may well turn out to be right, but as new data arrive, she had also better be prepared to change her mind."

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday, be safe and enjoy your family.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Evie4_je9P4/story01.htm Tyler Durden

One of the more painfully clueless observations made by pundits in recent weeks is that just because everyone is talking about a bubble, there can not possibly be a bubble.

Naturally, if one is tuned to only filter any bubble mentions, one will naturally have a cognitive bias of interpreting the world only through the eyes of “bubble watchers.” The flipside of course is that not everyone is a mindless member of the herd, rushing headlong into whatever precipice awaits lemmings just around the corner, and can still do simple math and recall what fundamentals looked like (as a reminder, forward multiples in 2007 looked very cheap too…before EPS for the S&P in 2008 plunged by over 50% which in retrospect would have made those forward multiples 100% higher).

But simple logic failure aside, what empirical evidence shows is that while there has been indeed a pick up in internet mentions of “stock bubble” according to Google Trends, it is still well below its prior high… hit in May 2007 and October 2007, just before and at the very peak of the last stock bubble.

We can only assume that the same pundits that somehow are getting airtime now, were the same ones who said in the summer of 2007 when the S&P had hit its prior, non-QE assisted all time high, that just because everyone is talking about a bubble there can’t possibly be a bubble…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/a8j8mbf6GgI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

A few days ago, in the latest escalation over the its territorial dispute with Japan regarding several islands in the East China Sea, China unveiled a so-called “Air Defense Identification” zone, shown on the map below, which includes not only the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in question, but stretches from South Korea all the way to Taiwan, and which requires that any overflights submit their plans to Beijing in advance.

The response by Japan and the US was immediate, with Japan blasting China’s retaliation to its own annexation of the Senkakus a year earlier and demonstratively neither Japan Airlines nor ANA complying with China’s demands, while the US, demonstrating its allegiance to Japan, flew B-52 bombers above the Air Defense Zone.

China promptly responded to what it perceived was Western hypocrisy:

China’s announcement to establish an Air Defense Identification Zone in East China Sea has drawn criticism from the United States and Japan, yet their blame is wrong.

 

Their logic is simple: they can do it while China can not, which could be described with a Chinese saying, “the magistrates are free to burn down houses while the common people are forbidden even to light lamps.”

 

It is known to all that the United States is among the first to set up an air defense zone in 1950, and later more than 20 countries have followed suit, which Washington has taken for granted.

 

However, as soon as China started to do it, Washington immediately voiced various “concerns.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday voiced concerns over the zone, fearing it might “constitute an attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” and a White House spokesman on Monday called the Chinese announcement over the weekend “unnecessarily inflammatory.”

 

…

 

Japan set up such a zone in the 1960s and it even one-sidedly allowed the zone to cover China’s Diaoyu Islands. But when China set up the zone covering the Diaoyu Islands, Tokyo immediately announced it “unacceptable” and Abe even called China’s move “dangerous.” It is totally absurd and unreasonable.

 

In one word, both Washington and Tokyo are pursuing double standards.

The latter should not come as a surprise to China, and the reason why such double standards are allowed to exist in a US superpower legacy world is because neither Japan nor the US believe China would actually dare to re-escalate further. However, in a world in which the US is no longer an undisputed superpower (especially in the aftermath of the Syrian debacle in which Putin schooled the Obama administration) that is changing.

The first clear indication that China would not just sit there and do nothing, came overnight when China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, passed through the Taiwan Strait on Thursday morning on its way to a training mission in the South China Sea.

Naturally, the training mission is just the pretext. China’s long-running if dormant feud with Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, is perhaps the best proxy of US interests in the region, where thanks to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the US sells arms and provides military training to the Taiwanese armed forces. China considers US involvement disruptive to the stability of the region, and made that quite clear in 2010 when Obama announced the decision to sell $6.4 billion in military hardware to the island leading to threats of economic sanctions from the mainland.

Which is why China crossing the Straits of Taiwan for the first time with its brand new aircraft carrier is nothing short of a message to Obama. From Xinhua:

It took about 10 hours for the carrier and its four escort ships to get through the strait separating the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.

 

The Liaoning entered the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday afternoon after it left its home port in Qingdao of east China’s Shandong Province on Tuesday for the South China Sea on a scientific and training mission.

 

It was escorted by two missile destroyers, the Shenyang and Shijiazhuang, and two missile frigates, the Yantai and Weifang.

 

The narrative gets scarier:

“During the voyage, the carrier has kept a high degree of vigilance against approaches from foreign warships and aircraft, according to Liaoning Captain Zhang Zheng. This is the first time the carrier has conducted a cross-sea training voyage and passed through the Taiwan Strait since it was commissioned into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in September last year, according to Zhang.”

But where it gets worst is that as BBC reported minutes ago, China has not only sent a symbolic message to the US, but a very literal one to Japan and everyone else who thought China would just sit there and do nothing, when it dispatched its own warplanes over the air defense zone.

China has sent warplanes to its newly declared air defence zone in the East China Sea, state media reports.

 

The vast zone, announced last week, covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

 

China has said all planes transiting the zone must file flight plans and identify themselves, or face “defensive emergency measures”. But Japan, South Korea and the US have all since flown military aircraft through the area.

 

China’s state news agency Xinhua quoted an air force colonel as saying the the warplanes had carried out routine patrols. The zone includes islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, which are claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.

What happens next: will Japan once again prod the not so sleeping dragon, and continue flying commercial (and military) airplanes over China’s expanded zone of control, without preclearance with Beijing, and will the US send some more strategic bombers just to prove that Obama didn’t win the Nobel peace prize for nothing?

And will then China once again re-escalate, perhaps through an “accidental” engagement with what it “vigilantly” thought was an
offensive act by “foreign warships and aircraft?” resulting in a major diplomatic scandal or worse. Or will it simply, and more effectively, launch a salvo of a few hundred billion US Treasurys into the electronic ether, sending the 10 Year yield over 3% and the Fed scrambling to preserve its centrally-planned house of cards?

So, the ball is now in the court of Japan, which lately has been engaging in increasingly more desperate and irrational actions to preserve a sense of control over its imploding economy and the whole “Fukushima thing”, and which means that much more entertainment is imminent.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/qG6dMTcOJ9g/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Chris Martenson via The Ludwig von Mises Institute,

The Fed is busy doing everything in its considerable power to get credit (that is, debt) growing again so that we can get back to what it considers to be “normal.”

But the problem is that the recent past was not normal. You may have already seen this next chart. It shows total debt in the U.S. as a percent of GDP:

 

(Source)

Somewhere right around 1980, things really changed, and debt began climbing far faster than GDP. And that, right there, is the long and the short of why any attempt to continue the behavior that got us to this point is certain to fail.

It is simply not possible to grow your debts faster than your income forever. However, that’s been the practice since 1980, and current politicians and Federal Reserve officials developed their opinions about “how the world works” during the 33-year period between 1980 and 2013.

Put bluntly, they want to get us back on that same track, and as soon as possible. The reason? Because every major power center, be that in D.C. or on Wall Street, tuned their thinking, systems, and sense of entitlement, during that period. And, frankly, a huge number of financial firms and political careers will melt away if and when that credit expansion finally stops. And stop it will; that’s just a mathematical certainty.

Total Credit Market Debt (TCMD) is a measure of all the various forms of debt in the U.S. That includes corporate, state, federal, and household borrowing. So student loans are in there, as are auto loans, mortgages, and municipal and federal debt. It’s pretty much everything debt-related. What it does not include, though, are any unfunded obligations, entitlements, or other types of liabilities. So the Social Security shortfalls are not in there, nor are the underfunded pensions at the state or corporate levels. TCMD is just debt, plain and simple.

As you can see in this next chart, since 1970, TCMD has been growing almost exponentially.

 

That tiny little wiggle happened in 2008-2009, and it apparently nearly brought down the entire global financial system. That little deviation was practically too much all on its own for the markets to handle.

Now debts are climbing again at a quite nice pace. That’s mainly due to the Fed monetizing U.S. federal debt just to keep things patched together. As an aside, based on this chart, we’d expect the Fed to not end their QE efforts until and unless households and corporations once more engage in robust borrowing. The system apparently needs borrowing to keep growing exponentially, or it risks collapse.

One could ask why credit can’t just keep growing. But there are many reasons to believe that the future will not resemble the past. Let’s start in 1980, when credit growth really took off. This period also happens to be the happy time that the Fed is trying (desperately) to recreate. Between 1980 and 2013, total credit grew by an astonishing 8 percent per year, compounded. I say “astonishing” because anything growing by 8 percent per year will fully double every 9 years. So let’s run the math experiment and ask what will happen if the Fed is successful and total credit grows for the next 30 years at exactly the same rate it did over the prior 30. That’s all. This is nothing fancy, and it is simply the same rate of growth that everybody got accustomed to while they were figuring out “how the world works.”

What happens to the current $57 trillion in TCMD as it advances by 8 percent per year for 30 years? It mushrooms into a silly number: $573 trillion. That is, an 8 percent growth paradigm gives us a 10-fold increase in total credit in just 30 years:

 

For perspective, the GDP of the entire globe was just $85 trillion in 2012. Even if we advance global GDP by some hefty number, like 4 percent per year for the next 30 years, under an 8 percent growth regime, U.S. credit would be twice as large as global GDP in 2043.

If that comparison didn’t do it for you, then just ask yourself: Why, exactly, would U.S. corporations, households, and government borrow more than $500 trillion over the next 30 years?

The total mortgage market is currently $10 trillion, so might the plan include developing an additional 50 more U.S. residential real estate markets?

So perhaps the situation moderates a bit, and instead of growing at 8 percent, credit market debt grows at just half that rate. So what happens if credit just grows by 4 percent per year? That gets us to $185 trillion, or another $128 trillion higher than today — a more than 3x increase. Again: for what will we borrow (only) $128 trillion for, over the next 30 years?

When I run these numbers, I am entirely confident that the rate of growth in debt between 1980 and 2013 will not be recreated between 2013 and 2043. But, I’ve been assuming that dollars remain valuable. If dollars were to lose 90 percent or more of their value (say, perhaps due to our central bank creating too many of them), then it’s entirely possible to achieve any sorts of fantastical numbers one wishes to see.

For the Fed to achieve anything even close to the historical rate of credit growth, the dollar will have to lose a lot of value. This may in fact be the Fed’s grand plan, and it’s entirely about keeping the financial system primed with sufficient new credit to prevent it from imploding.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/WjYOY09pikA/story01.htm Tyler Durden

With the bulk of the US still sleeping on this day of giving thanks, it is perhaps ironic that the Brits have been pounding away at the USD driving GBPUSD to 2013 highs. S&P futures jerked higher on the European open and clung to those gains, extending yesterday's small green close to new record highs (+4.5 points). US Treasury futures sold off modestly then recovered back to unch as the USD slipped gently lower (even as JPY weakness continued). Gold and silver are up around 0.5% from yesterday's close.

 

The Brits are punding (pun intended) the USD…

 

But that won't stop US stocks from rising…

 

Treasuries round trip from earlier weakness…

 

but gold has been limping higher (with no ubiquitous smackdown yet) since the US closed…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/rISHmV9BFzA/story01.htm Tyler Durden

With the bulk of the US still sleeping on this day of giving thanks, it is perhaps ironic that the Brits have been pounding away at the USD driving GBPUSD to 2013 highs. S&P futures jerked higher on the European open and clung to those gains, extending yesterday's small green close to new record highs (+4.5 points). US Treasury futures sold off modestly then recovered back to unch as the USD slipped gently lower (even as JPY weakness continued). Gold and silver are up around 0.5% from yesterday's close.

 

The Brits are punding (pun intended) the USD…

 

But that won't stop US stocks from rising…

 

Treasuries round trip from earlier weakness…

 

but gold has been limping higher (with no ubiquitous smackdown yet) since the US closed…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/rISHmV9BFzA/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Some holiday cheer from the one person who surely has the most reasons (over a trillion) to be thankful to Ben Bernanke for.

Gross: Give “thanks,” but not your wallet to the #Fed. Begin to de-risk if you haven’t already. @federalreserve

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) November 28, 2013

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/GhMLEOeJ8vs/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Some holiday cheer from the one person who surely has the most reasons (over a trillion) to be thankful to Ben Bernanke for.

Gross: Give “thanks,” but not your wallet to the #Fed. Begin to de-risk if you haven’t already. @federalreserve

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) November 28, 2013

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/GhMLEOeJ8vs/story01.htm Tyler Durden

For Shawndraka Mack, a 100% pay rise from her current $7.60 “would do just fine.” While some employees turn to blood plasma donation, and most are on food stamps (and other benefits), the mother of two teenagers (on Medicaid) told Bloomberg Businessweek, “I love what I do, but I don’t want to work for nothing.” Between the 40 hours a week she works and the benefits, Mack explains, “I work at McDonald’s and I can’t afford to eat there. It’s crazy.” Of course, McDonalds has ‘tips’ for surviving on their state-subsidized wages but once again, despite Harry Reid’s extrapolated charts, the reality of raising the minimum wage is lost on most who never stop to think of where the ‘money’ comes from; and besides employees have little to no leverage as we explained here.

 

Via Bloomberg Businessweek,

Mack, who is 40, has been working in the fast food business for 18 years. For the past six, she’s been at a McDonald’s in South Carolina, working 40 hours a week and making $7.60 an hour. “I love what I do, but I don’t want to work for nothing. I want to work for something,” she says.

 

…

 

Her fiancé is on disability, and the $600 he receives every month goes toward insurance for her 1990 Honda Accord, the phone bill, and some spending money for the kids. Her salary covers gas for her commute, electricity, and everything else the family needs. The kids are on Medicaid.

 

The family gets $345 a month in food stamps. Mack says she goes to the grocery store once a month, and whatever she buys has to last until the next trip. She brings her lunch to work every day. “I work at McDonald’s and I can’t afford to eat there. It’s crazy.”

 

…

 

A few weeks ago, Mack joined the effort to raise fast-food workers’ wages to at least $15 an hour. “That would do me just fine,” she says. “I expect to stay at McDonald’s. I just want to get paid more for what I know and what I do. I want to make sure my kids have a better life than I do.”

The harsh reality bottom line is if she wants to be able to afford McDonalds or anything else, she should motivate herself to be something more than a minimum wage food service worker.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/QJ1QUk8io_w/story01.htm Tyler Durden

For Shawndraka Mack, a 100% pay rise from her current $7.60 “would do just fine.” While some employees turn to blood plasma donation, and most are on food stamps (and other benefits), the mother of two teenagers (on Medicaid) told Bloomberg Businessweek, “I love what I do, but I don’t want to work for nothing.” Between the 40 hours a week she works and the benefits, Mack explains, “I work at McDonald’s and I can’t afford to eat there. It’s crazy.” Of course, McDonalds has ‘tips’ for surviving on their state-subsidized wages but once again, despite Harry Reid’s extrapolated charts, the reality of raising the minimum wage is lost on most who never stop to think of where the ‘money’ comes from; and besides employees have little to no leverage as we explained here.

 

Via Bloomberg Businessweek,

Mack, who is 40, has been working in the fast food business for 18 years. For the past six, she’s been at a McDonald’s in South Carolina, working 40 hours a week and making $7.60 an hour. “I love what I do, but I don’t want to work for nothing. I want to work for something,” she says.

 

…

 

Her fiancé is on disability, and the $600 he receives every month goes toward insurance for her 1990 Honda Accord, the phone bill, and some spending money for the kids. Her salary covers gas for her commute, electricity, and everything else the family needs. The kids are on Medicaid.

 

The family gets $345 a month in food stamps. Mack says she goes to the grocery store once a month, and whatever she buys has to last until the next trip. She brings her lunch to work every day. “I work at McDonald’s and I can’t afford to eat there. It’s crazy.”

 

…

 

A few weeks ago, Mack joined the effort to raise fast-food workers’ wages to at least $15 an hour. “That would do me just fine,” she says. “I expect to stay at McDonald’s. I just want to get paid more for what I know and what I do. I want to make sure my kids have a better life than I do.”

The harsh reality bottom line is if she wants to be able to afford McDonalds or anything else, she should motivate herself to be something more than a minimum wage food service worker.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/QJ1QUk8io_w/story01.htm Tyler Durden