Month: November 2019

Why are stocks soaring? Simple – it’s the fun-durr-mentals, stupid!

Source: Bloomberg

And everyone is chasing it now…

Chinese stocks all ended the day higher, but the afternoon session saw some giveback…

Source: Bloomberg

European stocks were all higher on the day, UK’s FTSE the laggard, Italy leader…

Source: Bloomberg

European equities surged to their highest level since August 2015 as miners to automakers advanced on optimism that U.S.-China trade talks are progressing.

Source: Bloomberg

Major US equities indices were all higher (Dow joining the party at record highs) with Trannies outperforming (NOTE – the indices basically did nothing from the US cash open onwards – except Trannies)…

 

Futures show the action a little better with the US-China deal headlines sparking a pre-open ramp to record highs and then once Europe closed, stocks faded…

Defensives were straight down from the open as Cyclicals gapped open (short-squeeze – see below)

Source: Bloomberg

Momo stocks were massacred, extending Friday’s plunge… this is the biggest 2-day drop since the peak of the quant quake in September…

Source: Bloomberg

As Michael Krause (@michaelbkrause) noted so succinctly: “Junk stock short squeeze day. L/S momentum falling apart, value not picking up the slack, and most volatile stocks killing it… The pious quants with a long-term research-driven view are off-sides today.”

And sure enough, “most shorted” stocks ripped at the open, thanks to yet more trade deal rumors…

Source: Bloomberg

And as momo melts down, stocks soar to record highs but Bloomberg’s SMART money flow indicator signals the big boys are not playing along…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields were all higher on the day with the long-end notably underperforming…

Source: Bloomberg

Which sent the yield curve notably steeper – erasing the post-Powell flattening…

Source: Bloomberg

30Y yields spiked 8bps today but if the quant quake is anything to go by, the yield should be soaring back near 3.00%…

Source: Bloomberg

Notably, the market expects just 1.2 more rate-cuts by the end of 2020 – dramatically less dovish than the 5 cuts expected in early September (2 of which have been delivered)…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar surged back to the lows of FOMC day…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin and Ethereum trod water since Friday with Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin outperforming…

Source: Bloomberg

PMs were lower on the day, copper and crude gained but the latter gave plenty back after Europe closed…

Source: Bloomberg

WTI held on to its $56 handle but couldn’t hold the $57 intraday…

And while gold slipped, it remains above $1500…

Gold/Oil is back at the upper end of its long-term rang again…

Source: Bloomberg

Since Powell’s dovish inflation comments, gold remains the leader – despite stocks surge today…

 

And finally, investors haven’t been this ‘Extremely Greedy’ since 2017…

Source: CNN

More than two years after President Trump infuriated the European Union (and particularly Germany and France) by declaring his intentions to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday officially began the yearlong process, according to a statement released by his office.

“Today the United States began the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement,” announces @SecPompeo in statement. pic.twitter.com/2koe8srxWu

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) November 4, 2019

Trump made the initial announcement on June 1, 2017. The earliest possible withdrawal date is Nov. 4, 2018.

Greta Thunberg and her Hollywood comrades will undoubtedly have something to say about the decision.

Columnist E. Jean Carroll – who gave a bizarre series of interviews and wrote a book (which bombed) claiming that President Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990’s, is back.

The 75-year-old Carroll, who stunned CNN‘s Anderson Cooper when she said “I think most people think of rape as being sexy,” is now suing Trump for defamation.

And while Carroll can’t remember if Trump penetrated her “halfway – or completely,” she refuses to use the term ‘rape’ for what she says happened.

“I am filing this on behalf of every woman who has ever been harassed, assaulted, silenced, or spoken up only to be shamed, fired, ridiculed and belittled,” said Carrol, who seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, according to the Washington Post.

Responding to the news, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham on Monday called the lawsuit “frivolous,” saying Carroll is a “fraud.”

“Let me get this straight – Ms. Carroll is suing the President for defending himself against false allegations?” she asked. “I guess since the book did not make any money she’s trying to get paid another way. The story she used to try and sell her trash book never happened, period. Her version of events is not even feasible if you’ve ever tried on clothing in a dressing room of a crowded department store. The lawsuit is frivolous and the story is a fraud – just like the author.”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

How Far Will They Go?

CBS-News carried another bucket of muddy water for the coup team Sunday night with a lead 60 Minutes agit-prop story on Maria Butina, an ambitious Russian cutie who worked the American NRA circuit in the most public manner imaginable to make herself into a sex-bomb celebrity at the exact the moment in history when the US Deep State wished to reinforce the fantasy, as Lesley Stahl put it, that “Russia was interfering in our electoral process.”

Of course, Ms. Stahl and her shifty producers left out half the story: how Maria Butina was manipulated by her FBI-handler and sometime-boyfriend, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who had been employed by the Bureau over the years on other undercover assignments. They didn’t mention him or seek to understand his role in the operation. But they gave plenty of air-time to the DOJ lawyer, John C Demers, who prosecuted Ms. Butina, and never bothered to ask Demers why Butina was not charged with espionage — perhaps because nothing remotely like that occurred.

How media giants like Ms. Stahl can keep mouthing this malarkey designed to stoke a new cold war is one of the great mysteries of our national psychology these days. You’d think they’d learned something from the train wreck of the Mueller Investigation, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, and the current debacle of Adam Schiff’s imploding Ukraine whistleblower caper — namely, that spouting lies will eventually get you found-out and disgraced.

But the coup team is now dangerously stuck tripling and quadrupling down on its fairy tale narrative as the reckoning of its dark deeds approaches and its star players await their turns on the witness stand. Half the country has been waiting patiently for authorities-of-standing to put an end to this Hitchcockian campaign of seditious fog that has driven us close to the brink of a second civil war. That half of the country has actually been reading the evidence of this treason and sedition — underwritten by Hillary Clinton and her allies — on the back-channels of the Internet. None of that evidence has been posted through the main media outlets wholly owned by the coup team, gospel to the other half of America, and soon millions of credulous bystanders who got high on three years of CIA-issued RussiaGate Kool-Aid will get the surprise of their lives when they discover how deeply they were played.

The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed.

They also badly underestimated the resources of what is now a very sturdy alt.media which has managed to weave the real story of what happened over the past three years into a shocking tapestry of massive subversion and treachery. A big part of the true story is how amazingly incompetent the RussiaGate coupsters were. Did they really believe they could conceal the ties between their agencies and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS operation, and its feckless front man, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and the whole outfit’s connection to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee? Did they suppose they could pass off Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud as Russian agents when the two have consorted with US and allied intelligence for decades? The US Department of Defense even holds Mr. Halper’s million-dollar pay stubs and Mr. Mifsud appears in photographs of every Western cloak-and-dagger cocktail get-together of spook officialdom for the last twenty years.

The latest, and most desperate gambit is the UkraineGate whistleblower, a CIA employee blatantly playing errand-boy for his mentor John Brennan and deeply tied to 2016 election shenanigans emanating from Ukraine, featuring his former employee, ex-Vice-President Joe Biden. This shadowy figure, pegged as Eric Ciaramella, 33, may shortly find himself in a grand jury chamber answering for his role in this charade. Ciaramella has just been hung out to dry by his sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff in a desperate attempt to dissociate himself from the huggermugger within his House Intel Committee that preceded the falsely blown whistle.

It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. The question is whether Messers Barr & Durham have the cojones to cater the banquet of consequences that this huge cast of characters should be made to feast from. Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.

Shortly after our latest discussion how JPM’s drain of liquidity via Money Markets and reserves parked at the Fed may have prompted the September repo crisis and subsequent repo and “Not QE” in order to reduce its at risk capital and potentially lower its G-SIB charge currently the highest of all major US banks, we not only got confirmation that the biggest US bank has been quietly rotating out of cash, but was also busy repositioning its balance sheet in another major way.

According to an overnight report from the FT, one which confirms what we already disclosed previously, namely that JPMorgan pushed more than $130bn of excess cash away from reserves in the process significantly tightening overall liquidity in the interbank market , the bulk of this money was allocated to long-dated bonds while cutting the amount of loans it holds, in what the FT dubbed was a “major shift in how the largest US bank by assets manages its enormous balance sheet.”

The moves saw the bank’s bond portfolio soar by 50%, and were prompted by capital rules that treat loans as riskier than bonds. And since JPM has been aggressively returning billions of dollars to shareholders in dividends and share buybacks each year, JPMorgan has far less room than most rivals to hold riskier assets, explaining its substantially higher G-SIB surcharge.

An executive at a large institutional investors told the FT that what JPM did “is incredible”, adding that “the scale of what JPMorgan is doing is mind-boggling . . . migrating out of cash into securities while loans are flat.”

The dramatic change, which occurred gradually over the year, and which may have catalyzed the spike in repo rates in September, was first flagged by JPMorgan at an investor event back in February. Then CFO Marianne Lake said that, after years of industry-leading loan growth, “we have to recognize the reality of the capital regime that we live in”.

So what exactly did JPMorgan do?

The biggest US bank by assets shrank its loans portfolio by 4%, or about $40bn, year to date; at the same time as selling off mortgages, the bank has reduced the amount of cash on its balance sheet and used it to buy long-dated bonds.

And in what may perhaps be a bet that sooner or later the Fed will launch a full-blown QE which again targets mortgage-backed securities, the FT notes that MBS account for the bulk of securities growth; an alternative regulatory reason is that banks can hold much less capital against mortgage bonds than the underlying home loans themselves.

Commenting on JPM’s strategist capital reallocation, Jeffery Harte of Sandler O’Neill said that JPMorgan’s revisewd approach “comes down to an economic decision: they can make more money selling [loans] than buying them.”

As the FT notes, Bank of America, JPM’s closest competitor, has more headroom under the Federal Reserve’s capital rules and continues to grow its loan portfolio. It has added $43bn in loans so far in 2019, largely but not exclusively mortgages. The contrasting strategy, analysts said, reflects its larger cushion under the Federal Reserve’s stress-testing regime.

And while JPMorgan continues to generate strong profits “and could add more risk to its balance sheet if it wanted to” it prefers to send the ample money it generates back to its shareholders. As a reminder, as disclosed during the latest stress test, JPM’s plans for the year ahead include $32bn in buybacks and dividends, more than the total net income the bank earned last year.

Steven Chubak of Wolfe Research said that JPMorgan “is doing the right thing given its idiosyncratic capital constraints,”  but the greater freedom afforded to BofA means it has “more capacity to grow loans which typically generate a higher spread” — and as such more room for profit growth.

Others are more skeptical: according to Charles Peabody of Portales Partners, who projects a bleak outlook for the banking industry, sees JPMorgan’s balance sheet choices as part of a larger risk-reduction strategy. The bank, he said, was “acting like the [next] recession is here — everything the bank is doing points that way.”

That’s certainly true, but the bigger picture here is just as fascinating: in order to boost interbank funding, and to force the Fed to inject more liquidity into the system, JPM first drained reserves and hit money markets…

… which in turn forced the Fed to boost its balance sheet by a whopping $250 billion in just the past 7 weeks as we noted earlier.

In other words, to ensure that JPM’s tens of billions in buybacks and divdends continue smoothly, Jamie Dimon may have held the entire US financial system hostage, forcing the Fed’s hand to restart “Not QE.”

In a development that doesn’t bode well for the future of public safety in America’s largest city, veteran NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill is reportedly expected to resign his post as soon as Monday, according to a report in the New York Post.

James O’Neill

The city’s top police official has been rumored to be on the cusp of resigning for months now, and it’s likely that he will make it official during a press briefing scheduled for Monday afternoon. His departure comes just over three years into his tenure.

The impetus for his departure is obvious: He refused to fire Officer Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who killed Staten Island resident Eric Garner back in 2014 as officers were trying to subdue him while placing him under arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes. Pantaleo was finally fired in August for allegedly placing Garner in an illegal chokehold that led to his death. Pantaleo is now suing the city, and O’Neill’s decision to go along with a judge’s recommendation to fire Pantaleo – who was acquitted on murder charges stemming from the killing – badly damaged his support among rank-and-file cops.

O’Neill’s departure caps off a career in policing that began more than 30 years ago when the East Flatbush native joined the NYC Transit Police at the age of 25 back in 1983. The transit police merged with the NYPD in 1995, and O’Neill subsequently worked his way up the ranks in the department, serving as a commanding officer in three districts.

O’Neill’s decision comes at a difficult time for the NYPD. NYC residents who have been incensed by the rash of police shootings that helped launched the “Black Lives Matter” movement are becoming increasingly hostile to the NYPD, often treating them more like an occupying force than the public servants responsible for a staggering drop in the city’s crime rate since it peaked in the early 1990s. Under O’Neill’s leadership, the city’s murder rate hit an all-time low during the first half of this year.

Without the work of the NYPD, the many “hip” Brooklyn neighborhoods that have been caught up in the wave of gentrification in the borough over the past 15 years would still be too dangerous for all the young, white twentysomethings who migrated there to find work (or to waste their rich parents’ money).

New York’s CBS News affiliate reported last week that an NYPD vehicle was vandalized on Halloween Night. A small group of residents were seen laughing and taunting two police officers cleaning up the vehicle in a brazen show of disrespect.

Still, the officers at the scene showed tremendous restraint while cleaning the broken eggs, rotten food and cardboard covering their vehicle. The officers were responding to a domestic dispute call nearby when the incident occurred.

Over the summer, a similar incident garnered national attention when gang members dumped buckets of water on an NYPD officer’s head.

With Mayor Bill de Blasio still in power, finding a replacement for O’Neill could prove difficult: De Blasio has developed a reputation for being hostile to his own police force, often taking the side of SJW activists over his own top police officials. Given the utter lack of support he has been shown during his tenure, the only surprising thing about O’Neill’s departure is that he managed to hang on for this long.