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Friday October 30, 2009

DrStockPick.com Article

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Too big to fail, is still heavy in the derivative market, and primed for a gigantic collapse.

Congress needs a chimney sweep to clean the soot from the smoke they’ve been blowing. Our do nothing congress; well we can’t really say do nothing, they did bail out the banks, and they have raised more money for themselves this session from Insurance, health care and bank lobbyists than in any other one year period, and the year isn’t even over. Now they are spreading the word, the gospel of Obama, it’s time to

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Meryn King, the British counterpart to U.S. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, had this to say in a speech yesterday: “The United Kingdom faces two fundamental long-run challenges. First, to rebalance the economy, with more resources allocated to business investment and net exports and fewer to consumption. "That is consistent with the need – now widely accepted – to eliminate the large structural fiscal deficit and to raise the national saving rate. It is part of a need for a wider rebalancing of domestic demand in the world economy away from those countries that borrowed and ran current account deficits towards those that lent and ran surpluses." Everything he has to say about the UK is true in spades for the US. The US. is more dependent on consumption than is the UK and perpetually runs trade (current account) deficits. We need for the US to ...

David Einhorn, highly respected hedge fund manager of Greenlight Capital and author of “Fooling some of the people all of the time” yesterday delivered the keynote address at the Value Investing Congress. His full speech can be accessed here, but Rolfe Winkler of Reuters has very handily published the highlights, as posted below.

On Bernanke and Geithner: Presently, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner have become the quintessential short-term decision makers. They explicitly “do whatever it takes” to “solve one problem at a time” and deal with the unintended consequences later. It is too soon for history to evaluate their work, because there hasn’t been time for the unintended consequences of the “do whatever it takes” decision-making to materialize.

On too big to fail and the true lesson of Lehman: The proper way to deal with too-big-to-fail, or too inter-connected to fail, is to make sure

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This is Part 2 of a guest contribution by David Kotok* and Bob Eisenbeis** of Cumberland Advisors. (Click here for Part 1.)

Note to Readers:  This is the second of our two-part commentary on the Fed’s exit strategy and the role the Fed has played in complicating its own operating strategies and ability to conduct monetary policy.

In their Wall St. Journal op-ed entitled “The BLOB That Ate Monetary Policy” (September 27, 2009), the Dallas Fed’s Fisher and Rosenblum use the movie metaphor of the BLOB to describe the “too big to fail” banks.  They argue that these BLOBs stood in the way of the Fed’s monetary policy’s low interest rates and thereby “gummed up” the “monetary policy channel,” which would otherwise be able to stimulate economic activity.

The op-ed doesn’t name names.  But we will.  If you examine the list of the Fed’s primary

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The cost of insuring against the default of major financial institutions has reached its lowest level since June 2008, according to the Counterparty Risk Index from Credit Derivatives Research LLC.

The chart below shows the Counterparty Risk Index (CRI) history since the beginning of 2008. The index is an unweighted average of the credit default swap spreads of 14 major financial institutions. The left-hand scale gives the cost (in basis points) of insuring against default for a five-year term.

 

 

The three big spikes on the chart mark the near-failure of Bear Stearns (in March 2008), the Lehman default (September 2008) and renewed concerns over bank safety at the market’s nadir in March 2009.

If crises appeared at six-monthly intervals since last spring, this time we appear to have broken out of the cycle.

What about the individual banks that make up the index? Here is a chart,

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Is the government creating another subprime-mortgage bubble?

The first time around, the three-headed federal serpent – the Bush administration, the Treasury Department and the U.S. Federal Reserve – used Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) to “legitimize” trillions of dollars worth of toxic financial waste known as subprime mortgages.

The result was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression – a mess that was global in nature.

And we’re now headed for a repeat performance.

Some of the players may have changed since the first subprime-mortgage crisis, but the game apparently remains the same. With banks currently unwilling to lend, the new federal triumvirate of the Obama administration, the Treasury and the Fed are trying to inflate the moribund U.S. housing market. This time around, however, the FHA is the weapon of choice.

Obama & Co. are making an all-or-nothing bet that the

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“Whether through exuberant hedgies or anxious private investors, gold just keeps pushing higher…”

So speculative betting on gold going higher now equals a record-busting 752-tonne position in Comex futures and options, yet this is not a bubble according to Michael Pento of Deltaga.

Let’s say otherwise. Let’s say that gold prices, surging by almost $100-per-ounce in barely a month, are very much in a bubble…blown up by near-zero interest rates worldwide and a sharply negative cost of borrowing after inflation. Were that the case, the question before potential and existing investors would be simple:

Is this “irrational exuberance” or a “permanently high plateau”?

Alan Greenspan applied the former to US price/earnings in Dec. 1996; Irving Fisher said the latter of US equities in Oct. 1929. Both were looking at what history would decide were clearly bubbles in hindsight. But Greenspan was three years and 105% early.

Fisher spoke less than 72 hours before

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Gold’s Two-Faced Disappointment

With the price of gold again pulling back from its 18-month highs this morning, we start to see more cracks in the bullish $2000 an ounce gold argument. But that shouldn’t surprise. Gold is a two sided, two-faced coin that has very distinct personalities.

On one side, we have the hedge against inflation, a reserve currency and the only grail that gold bugs from around the world will believe in.

On the other, we have gold as a real commodity, used in jewelry, electronics, computers and space components.

But all that glitters isn’t golden, and gold investors can’t have it both ways.

The best question we’ve heard to date has been where will you spend you golden Krugerrands when the world comes to an end? The answer is you won’t be able to spend them, anywhere.

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In December 2005, Citigroup announced a new 10-year, $100 million bond issue... At any time, Citigroup has hundreds of different bond issues trading in the markets. Right now, for example, my Bloomberg terminal shows over 500 different Citigroup bonds. There was nothing special about this 2005 issue... The housing market was rising, Wall Street's mortgage machine was in full swing, and America was enjoying the peak of its prosperity. At the time, you and I were paying 6% to borrow money secured against our houses. Citigroup would pay 5.3% to borrow money, unsecured. For two years, these bonds traded in a narrow band between $95 and $105. Then in March 2008, Bear Stearns failed and prices started to erode... Citi's bonds broke $90 in July, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed. They broke $80 in September, when Lehman failed. And by March ...

Joining us today is John Bougearel, author of the renowned book Riding the Storm Out. Enjoy as Jon states his case for why the third quarter high may already be in place. As always be sure to comment and let us know your thoughts.

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The problem with being perpetually short is the need to be willing to be perpetually chased out of the market for an untold number of short-covering rallies. This strategy works well for nimble traders that have a great feel for market behavior. The reason I start this report off with the saying “if you’re not short already is that you will indeed risk missing the turn. We got a lot of ground to cover, here, so let’s start with the big picture on the weekly charts, then move right into the daily and intraday charts.

Don’t Mess with Mr. 18

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