Thursday, June 20, 2013

Brace yourself. Or, as we used to say in the Army, BOHICA...


The market has selling off substantially for over 24 hours now, with no visible signs of stopping.  

The real story is in the FX markets which are utterly going apeshit, along with the Treasury Curve which is blowing wildly higher (rates); the TNX is now +5.9% on the day (10 year).  The odd part of this is that the 30 year is only up 2.4% -- but the FVX (5 year) is up a stunning 15% -- straight up. Mortgage backed securities have fallen over 200 basis points in the last 36 hours. Gold is plummeting as well.

Reduce risk folks—the FX moves alone are going to generate some very interesting margin activity over the next couple of days, and coming right into the maw of a Quad Expiration along with the bond market moves..... oh boy.

What we have here is a massive clusterfuck.  "QE" has been a disaster, irrespective of what you think about Bernanke's "crisis management."  The fact of the matter is that the "crisis" was in 2007 and 2008, The Fed caused it with its policies back in 2001-2004 and through willful and intentional failures in supervision of the banks and non-banks through 2007 and Bernanke was both there and then running the show during that time; in point of fact he was one of the chief cheerleaders for Greenspan's policies during that time period!


You can always trust the guy who blew it to blow it again and that's exactly what has happened.  Not necessarily hyperinflation; what we've done is grossly inflate fast-money asset prices while the rest of the economy does not merit those prices.

Any sort of dispassionate analysis must arrive at the same end-point--the gross and outrageous distortion of borrowing costs and "easy money" have massively diluted the currency while at the same time has led corporations to make radically uneconomic decisions that only work due to those distortions, but during the time they're in place they are the only reasonable way to satisfy investors.

That is a recipe for a massive reversion back to value and what's worse is that the costs, particularly the rollover risks that have now become embedded through the economy, are going to screw people up, down and sideways.

You and I don't see these risks because rollover risk is something that most consumers never deal with (except for those who were in Option ARMs during the bubble, of course—they got a lesson in it first-hand and most of them went ka-boom because they were stupid.)  But for corporations and governments this risk is a daily issue that never goes away.  Schools, roads, capital equipment in business and even operating expenses are often rolled up into various financing packages none of which are typically amortized to completion and retired--they are instead rolled over continually because this makes your operating results look much better than they otherwise would.

The problem is that this "picture" of the health of your enterprise is dangerously distorted.  The fact of the matter is that debt, when taken to increase production, can be beneficial provided you can and do retire it at a rate that exceeds the economic service life of whatever it buys.  When it is rolled over on a continual basis it is not beneficial; it simply adds leverage to your enterprise, whether a company or a government.

The reality of leverage is that it amplifies results, both on the upside and the downside. It's a math thing, and since we refused to learn this in 2007 we will get taught the lesson again—soon.


Brace.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

We're Number One...in San Francisco??

Really? How did this happen?

I guess it explains much regarding me, personally. I did--for reasons unknown--grow up in a household that loved the University of Michigan. I can remember watching Michigan play in the Rose Bowl (what seemed like) every single year; my father going on and on about how great Bo Schembechler was and how what a  great academic school UM was.

"The Berkeley of the Midwest," he called it.

Something must have stuck. Because here I am; almost 30 years later and 2500 miles away. But you know what; turns out I didn't grow up in an isolated household. In fact, it turns a lot out people in San Franscisco love the University of Michigan.

How much?

According to Deadspin, more than any other college competing in this year's NCAA basketball tourney. More than longtime powers Duke, UNC and Kansas. More even than local entrants St. Mary's (from nearby Moraga) or UC Berkeley, who's main campus is only a jaunt across the Bay Bridge away.

Here's Deadspin regarding teams that failed to win the popular vote of their local surrounding areas.

"That leaves Cal as the most baffling: the prestigious public university didn’t manage to snag even one of the eight counties that make up the Bay Area. One went to also-local Saint Mary’s, six went to Kansas, Duke, or UNC, and San Francisco, for some reason, went to Michigan."


So I guess there's only one thing left to say.

HAIL.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

That "can't happen here." Bullshit, it can't. It already has.



Anyone remember what happened 71 years ago this week?

Probably not.

On February 19th, 1942 FDR willfully and intentionally violated The Constitution, an act for which he should have been impeached. I am speaking of the Executive Order 9066, more commonly referred to as Japanese Internment--the rounding up of over 100,000 people who were frog-marched into Concentration Camps on American soil.  Far more than half of these people were American Citizens with a full and complete set of alleged Constitutional Rights.

We, America, did this.

We, America, imprisoned our own citizens without trial, without suspicion, without due process of law and without evidence. We did so merely on their genetic code and the ancestry of their parents. We did this on American soil and through the American mainland, not in some foreign combat zone.

I repeat:  We, Americans, did this.

We did this here.  We not only took these people's freedom without cause we dispossessed them of every worldly thing they owned that was not able to be carried in their hands at the time they were rounded up.



 Those who are in our government in any capacity, local, state or federal, and state that our government "would never do such a thing" are factual liars, as our government has already proved through its own actions that it not only will do so, but has done exactly that.

NEVER AGAIN is not just for Jewish people. 

It is for us all.