Month: July 2014

Despite an impressive ramp by USDJPY in the last two hours of trading (thank you Nomura and BOJ) whose purpose was to get the DE Shaw and all other correlation algos to push spoos higher, today’s trifecta of the ugly guidance by Visa (which dominated the DJIA), very ugly earnings by Amazon (which dominated the Nasdaq) and the CME ES margin hike just proved too much, and while Friday may have been the new Tuesday following 11 “green” DJIA Fridays in a row, today’s 123 point drop stopped the trend before lucky 12 out of 12.

As can be seen on the chart below, after hitting daily all time highs for several consecutive days, today’s drop pushed the S&P back to levels last seen during last week’s MH17 scare. A tactical near-term downgrade of stocks by Goldman in the last few hours of trading (following David Kostin’s upgrade to his S&P price target two weeks ago) probably didn’t help although (actually it helped since stocks rose since the time the Goldman report hit mailboxes) it is amusing that someone still thinks Goldman sellside research still has any sway (as opposed to merely indicating what the Goldman prop desk is not doing).

 

And while today was otherwise a rather mundane day, what stood out was an impressive ramp in gold toward the end of trading, and especially in the minutes before the close, which we attribute to rising geopolitical fears as both the situation in Ukraine and in Israel are getting worse by the minute.

In short, this week was largely a wash which makes sense ahead of next week’s data slam when we get both the all important NFP and Q2 GDP prints. While NFP will almost certainly be a continuation of the part-time jobs soaring trend seen in recent months, the biggest question is whether Q2 GDP will print above or below 2.9%: if below, then the entire first half of 2014 will be negative, which according to some purists is equivalent to a technical recession. A bigger question is what climatic event will the scapegoat crew blame a collapse in Q2 GDP on,

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1lEyalj Tyler Durden

It’s one thing to implicitly admit that there is a physical gold shortage and as a result nations – such as Germany – are unable to repatriate their physical gold held in the safe and trusted confines 90 feet below the NY Fed, gold which may or may not be there and has likely been leased out exponentially to cover paper shorts by virtually every BIS-overseen central bank (and the BIS paper gold selling team itself of course). It is something totally different to corzine, as in vaporize, 87,000 ounces of physical gold, some 2.7 tons, and blame it on a computer upgrade glitch. Which is precisely what Rand, Afrrica’s largest refinery and processor of about a third of the world’s gold since 1920, has done after it “discovered” that $113 million in precious metal was missing after “adopting a new computer system.”

Bloomberg reports that the refinery in Germiston, a town 20 kilometers east of Johannesburg, has 87,000 ounces of physical gold less than the amount present in its accounting records after “implementation difficulties” with the new system, the company said in a statement today. That’s worth about $113 million at today’s price of $1,296 an ounce.

Taking a page out of China’s infinite rehypothecation scheme, the South African refiner essentially told its investors, most of whom are gold miners, to step up and replenish the missing metal or else investors may come asking questions about their own reported gold holdings. And, it succeeded.

Rand Refinery’s shareholders, including AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. (ANG), Sibanye Gold Ltd. (SGL) and Harmony Gold Mining Co. (HAR), agreed to lend the company 1.2 billion rand to help make up the difference.

Laughable excuses aside, those curious where the gold may have gone should probably ask the former CEO: “Howard Craig resigned as chief executive officer in May and has been replaced by Mark Lynam, who is being assisted by management consultant Accenture Plc in sorting out the issue.”

However, just like in China, it appears nobody has any interest in actually digging deeper:

The miners, customers of the refinery, have received the prices they were expecting, leading them to conclude it’s most likely an accounting problem rather than theft, James Wellsted, a spokesman for Sibanye Gold, said by phone.

Perhaps it is normal when nearly 3 tons of physical gold goes missing for nobody to care. Alternatively, perhaps it means that just like the entire financial Ponzi system, which can sustain the lies only as long as everyone agress not to defect, the rot within the gold space has now shifted away purely from the commercial and central banks and is now impacting the miners and refiners. If so, anyone who owns gold is encouraged to take physical possession of it asap because if, as this incident suggests, the Chinese rehypothecation experiment has gone global, when everyone does demand their deliverable be, well, delivered, it will be too late.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1pla2Fz Tyler Durden

It’s one thing to implicitly admit that there is a physical gold shortage and as a result nations – such as Germany – are unable to repatriate their physical gold held in the safe and trusted confines 90 feet below the NY Fed, gold which may or may not be there and has likely been leased out exponentially to cover paper shorts by virtually every BIS-overseen central bank (and the BIS paper gold selling team itself of course). It is something totally different to corzine, as in vaporize, 87,000 ounces of physical gold, some 2.7 tons, and blame it on a computer upgrade glitch. Which is precisely what Rand, Afrrica’s largest refinery and processor of about a third of the world’s gold since 1920, has done after it “discovered” that $113 million in precious metal was missing after “adopting a new computer system.”

Bloomberg reports that the refinery in Germiston, a town 20 kilometers east of Johannesburg, has 87,000 ounces of physical gold less than the amount present in its accounting records after “implementation difficulties” with the new system, the company said in a statement today. That’s worth about $113 million at today’s price of $1,296 an ounce.

Taking a page out of China’s infinite rehypothecation scheme, the South African refiner essentially told its investors, most of whom are gold miners, to step up and replenish the missing metal or else investors may come asking questions about their own reported gold holdings. And, it succeeded.

Rand Refinery’s shareholders, including AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. (ANG), Sibanye Gold Ltd. (SGL) and Harmony Gold Mining Co. (HAR), agreed to lend the company 1.2 billion rand to help make up the difference.

Laughable excuses aside, those curious where the gold may have gone should probably ask the former CEO: “Howard Craig resigned as chief executive officer in May and has been replaced by Mark Lynam, who is being assisted by management consultant Accenture Plc in sorting out the issue.”

However, just like in China, it appears nobody has any interest in actually digging deeper:

The miners, customers of the refinery, have received the prices they were expecting, leading them to conclude it’s most likely an accounting problem rather than theft, James Wellsted, a spokesman for Sibanye Gold, said by phone.

Perhaps it is normal when nearly 3 tons of physical gold goes missing for nobody to care. Alternatively, perhaps it means that just like the entire financial Ponzi system, which can sustain the lies only as long as everyone agress not to defect, the rot within the gold space has now shifted away purely from the commercial and central banks and is now impacting the miners and refiners. If so, anyone who owns gold is encouraged to take physical possession of it asap because if, as this incident suggests, the Chinese rehypothecation experiment has gone global, when everyone does demand their deliverable be, well, delivered, it will be too late.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1pla2Fz Tyler Durden

Beneath all of the bogus economic data, the US economy is tanking again.

 

One of the biggest games played by the bean counters in Washington in the US is the overstatement of GDP growth by understating inflation.

 

Consider this simple example. Let’s say that the US GDP grew by 10% last year. Now let’s say that inflation also grew by 10%. In this scenario, real inflation adjusted GDP growth was ZERO. However, announcing ZERO GDP growth is a major problem politically.

 

So what do the Feds do? They claim that inflation was just 8%, and BOOM you’ve got 2% GDP growth announced for a year in which real GDP growth was actually zero.

 

This game is played all the time via a metric called the GDP “deflator.” Technically what this is meant to do is remove the effects of inflation from the GDP growth numbers to show what real growth was.

 

However, what it actually ends up being is an accounting gimmick that allows the numbers to overstate GDP growth.

 

For this reason, when I look at the US economy’s growth I prefer to use its nominal GDP numbers. These numbers do not include a deflator metric. As such they’re much closer to showing the actual growth as opposed to the gimmicked “real GDP” numbers.

 

With that in mind, take a look at the chart below:

 

 

As you can see, the US economy is once again slowing down rapidly with a sub-4 reading. I’ve circled all of the other times the US economy has registered a reading like this in the last 40 years.

 

ALL of them were periods that were later identified as recessions.

 

So the Fed is once again facing a recession… at a time when it has already cut interest rates to zero and engaged in just about every monetary loosening imaginable. To top it off, inflation is already appearing due to the Fed’s previous actions.

 

There is a term for slow growth and high inflation: it’s stagflation. Sure it doesn’t show up in the official data. But then again, when was the last time reality did show up there?

 

This concludes this article. If you’re looking for the means of protecting your portfolio from the coming collapse, you can pick up a FREE investment report titled Protect Your Portfolio at http://ift.tt/170oFLH.

 

This report outlines a number of strategies you can implement to prepare yourself and your loved ones from the coming market carnage.

 

Best Regards

 

Phoenix Capital Research

 

 

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1npEVfl Phoenix Capital Research

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man

Dollarized Panama Issues Price Controls For Basic Goods

Less than four weeks after starting his new job, Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela already has a serious challenge to deal with: empty grocery shelves.

This is largely a self-inflicted wound that was bound to happen.

Fresh on the heels of his victory in May, the then President-elect announced that one of his first orders would be to regulate prices for staple food products.

He followed through on his promise, establishing price controls on certain brands of roughly two dozen items like chicken, rice, eggs, and bread.

And within a matter of weeks, many grocery store shelves are already empty, at least for the regulated items.

It’s not quite Venezuela or Cuba where it can be downright impossible to buy a roll of toilet paper. But it’s more proof that price controls almost always backfire.

The larger issue here is why the Panamanian government is controlling prices to begin with. The answer is simple: inflation.

According to the Panamanian government, the price of basic foods rose 4.1% from April 2013 to April 2014.

Over the last five years, in fact, food prices have risen more than 24%.

And when average wages are little more than a few hundred dollars a month, a 24% increase in food prices really hurts.

Now, inflation isn’t a particularly unusual phenomenon in Central America, or in developing countries in general.

But what sets Panama apart is that the country is dollarized.

In its entire 111-year history as a sovereign nation, in fact, Panama has never issued its own currency.

Locals and foreigners alike pay US dollars for goods and services across Panama just as you would in Houston, Jacksonville, or Las Vegas.

This means that the country is subject to all the whims and consequences of US monetary policy; when the Fed conjures money out of thin air, the negative effects are quickly exported to Panama.

Yet while it suffers all of the downside of quantitative easing, Panama enjoys very little of the upside.

Of the jobs that the Fed claims they have created by printing $3.7 trillion over the last few years, zero of those have ended up in Panama.

Not to mention, the Panamanian government doesn’t have an endless supply of foreigners lining up to buy its debt.

So to get a true sense of US dollar inflation… and where it’s headed in the Land of the Free… one only need look at dollarized countries like Panama.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/WRbV5T Tyler Durden

As we have been highlighting for a few weeks, something is rotten in high-yield credit markets. This week, the mainstream media is starting to catch on as major divergences in performance (high-yield bond spreads are 30-40bps off their cycle tights from just prior to MH17 even as stocks rally to new record highs) and technicals weaken. However, as BofA warns, flows follow returns and this week saw the biggest outflows from high-yield funds in more than a year. Investment grade bonds saw notable inflows as investors chose up-in-quality, rather than reach-for-yield, for the first time in years: equity investors, pay attention.

 

High yield credit markets have been overvalued for a record period of time…

 

On Tuesday, analysts at Ned Davis Research recommended that investors begin to sell high-yield bonds, partly because they look pricey and partly because performance has been flagging. “Investors are no longer being compensated for the additional risk in high-yield bonds,” they wrote.

High yield credit markets are majorly diverging from stocks…

“Geopolitical risk is causing a pause,” said Frank Ossino, senior portfolio manager at Newfleet Asset Management in Hartford, Conn., which oversees $12.9 billion. Investors tend to flee riskier assets during times of turmoil.

High yield credit markets are suffering major outflows…

 

Outflows from high yield funds and ETFs accelerated last week to $2.46bn following a sizable $1.85bn outflow in the prior week. Both of these outflows are the largest since the “taper tantrum”episode in the summer of last year.

“We’re not seeing massive outflows yet, but at some point that’s going to change,” warned Phil Blancato, chief executive at Ladenburg Thalmann Asset Management, which oversees about $2 billion.

He said he is steering clear of high-yield exchange-traded funds in large part due to concerns about how they will fare in a downturn.

*  *  *

Between a sudden shift to a preference for “strong” balance sheet companies over “weak” balance sheet companies (the end of the dash for trash trade), and this rotation from high-yield to investment-grade, it is clear that investors are positioning defensively up-in-quality ending the constant reach-for-yield trade of the last 5 years.

Why should ‘equity’ investors care? The last few years’ gains in stocks have been thanks massively to record amounts of buybacks (juicing EPS and also providing a non-economic bid to the market no matter what happens). This financial engineering – for even the worst of the worst credit –  has been enabled by massive inflows into high-yield and leveraged loan funds, lowering funding costs and allowing CFOs to destroy/releverage their firms all in the goal of raising the share price.

Simply put – equity prices cannot rally for long without the support of high-yield credit markets – never have, never will – as they are both ‘arbitrageable’ bets on the same capital structure. There can be a divergence at the end of a cycle as managers get over their skis with leverage and the high yield credit market decides it has had enough risk-taking… but it only ends with equity and credit weakening together. That is the credit cycle… it cycles.

Jeff Gundlach was right.

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