FedUpUSA

Archive for September 20th, 2011

With the FOMC meeting currently in full swing, speculation is rampant what will be announced tomorrow at 2:15 pm, with the market exhibiting its now traditional schizophrenic mood swings of either pricing in QE 6.66, or, alternatively, the apocalypse, with furious speed. And while many are convinced that at least the “Twist” is already guaranteed, as is an IOER cut, per Goldman’s “predictions” and possibly something bigger, as per David Rosenberg who thinks that an effective announcement would have to truly shock the market to the upside, the truth is that the Chairman’s hands are very much tied. Because, all rhetoric and political posturing aside, at the very bottom it is and has always been a money problem. Specifically, one of “credit money.” Which brings us to the topic of this post. When the Fed released its quarterly Z.1 statement last week, the headlines predictably, as they always do, focused primarily on the fluctuations in household net worth (which is nothing but a proxy for the stock market now that housing is a constant drag to net worth) and to a lesser extent, household credit. Yet the one item that is always ignored, is what is by and far the most important data in the Z.1, and what the Fed apparatchiks spend days poring over, namely the update on the liabilities held in the all important shadow banking system. And with the data confirming that the shadow banking system declined by $278 billion in Q2, the most since Q2 2010, it is pretty clear that Bernanke’s choice has already been made for him. Because with D.C. in total fiscal stimulus hiatus, in order to offset the continuing collapse in credit at the financial level, the Fed will have no choice but to proceed with not only curve flattening (to the detriment of America’s TBTF banks whose stock prices certainly reflect what a complete Twist-induced flattening of the 2s10s implies) but offsetting the ongoing implosion in the all too critical, yet increasingly smaller, shadow banking system. And without credit growth, at either the commercial bank, the shadow bank or the sovereign level, one can kiss GDP growth, and hence employment, and Obama’s second term goodbye.

As the two charts below demonstrate, the economy’s ongoing inability to create any growth in the shadow banking system, primarily as a result of the complete shut down of the securitization machine, has been and continues to be, the biggest threat to the Fed. Specifically, after hitting an all time high of $20.9 trillion in March of 2008, this all too critical source of “credit money” has collapsed by a whopping 25%: since the peak $5.5 trillion of credit, and not just any credit, but shadow, and thus non-regulated credit, has evaporated! And as Q2 demonstrated, after almost bottoming in Q1 following a decline of just $57 billion, or the smallest Q/Q decline since Q2 2008, the drop has picked up again, with a one year high $278 billion plunge in Q2.

Among the liability components of the Shadow Banking system’s credit money abstractions, we look at:

• Money Market Mutual Funds: at $2.6 trillion, a decline of $41.6 billion Q/Q
• GSE and Agency Paper: at $6.5 trillion, a decline of $73.8 billion Q/Q
• ABS Issuers At $2.2 trillion, a decline of $80.4 billion Q/Q
• Repos at $1.2 trillion, a decline of $49 billion Q/Q
• Open Market Paper at $1.1 trillion, a decline of $50 billion Q/Q
• and these declines were offset by a tiny increase of $17 billion to $726 billion at Funding Corporations

Altogether, added across this amounts to a massive $278 billion in the second quarter, and explains why GDP, when the manipulation from the Census Bureau is eliminated would have probably declined. What is worse is that should this decline continue without an offset, there will be no economic growth guaranteed.

So where can said offset come from? Well, just as there is a shadow banking system, so there is a traditional commercial bank system with listed liabilities. To be sure, for the duration of collapse in the shadow banking system, this has been the only offset, although granted one that is not nearly doing a good enough job. Specifically, total liabilities of Commercial Banks in Q2 were $13.4 trillion, an increase of $238 billion in the quarter. Alas, this is nowhere near enough to offset the decline in Shadow Banking, having grown by “only” $2.6 trillion since Q2 2008, even as shadow liabilities declined by double this amount. Yet there was a brief saving grace came in Q1 when the spike in Traditional liabilities more than offset the drop in Shadow, as the cumulative total rose by $337 billion, the most since 2008. Too bad, however, that adding across these two categories (second chart below), we once again witnessed a decline in Q2, amounting to $40.1 billion. This explains not only why QE2 could only do so much, but why GDP growth has rolled over and is now almost certainly negative.

What is most important to keep in mind, is that Traditional Commercial Bank assets only grow courtesy of QE. And with Shadow banking continuing to implode, Commercial Banks have to pick up the slack or else… Which in turn means Bernanke has to keep pumping reserves. Whether banks use these to lend out, or to buy shares of Netflix is irrelevant: remember – America, and the entire developed world, is a credit driven system. Take away credit growth and it is game over.

Which explains why tomorrow’s decision is a formality: Bernanke has no choice but to continue offsetting the relentless contraction in shadow liabilities, which as of Q2 collapsed at an annualized rate of over $1 trillion. Incidentally this, +$1, is the very minimum that Bernanke
will have to bring into reserve circulation to offset the relentless deleveraging of the once biggest contributor to American growth, which ironically is now the biggest adverse factor.

That reversion to the mean sure can be a bitch.

ZeroHedge

As Trekkies can attest to, breaching the Temporal Prime Directive is never, ever a good thing.  It usually ends very badly.  I hope none of you are wearing a red shirt.

So We No Longer Need NBBO, Right?

This is now at the level of a farce:

On September 15, 2011, beginning at 12:48:54.600, there was a time warp in the trading of Yahoo! (YHOO) stock. HFT has reached speeds faster than the speed-of-light, allowing time travel into the future. Up to 190 milliseconds into the future, or 0.19 fantaseconds is the record so far. It all happened in just over one second of trading, the evidence buried under an avalanche of about 19,000 quotations and 3,000 individual trade executions. The facts of the matter are indisputable. Based on official exchange timestamps, there is unmistakable proof that YHOO trades were executed on quotes that didn’t exist until 190 milliseconds later!

Let’s make sure everyone understands what’s being talked about here – there were trades executed on quotes that hadn’t yet occurred.

Or at least this is what the timestamps represented.

There is absolutely no excuse for this.  It is an absolutely trivial matter to have synchronized time nowdays.  Not by 190 milliseconds, but by a fraction of a millisecond.  In fact, with no effort whatsoever, the colocated server that runs this blog keeps time to within about one millisecond, and I could be more accurate if I cared to spend some money.  That is, I literally am accurate within one millisecond spending zero, using only multiple Internet resources available to everyone (ntpd, to be precise.)  When I ran MCSNet I had a radio clock that sync’d off WWVB and provided time to our network – I picked it up surplus for under $100 and it provided a “chime” timesource accurate to within about a half a millisecond.  Modern GPS receivers can provide similar time service with nothing more than a cable (I have one here at my home in just this application) and likewise are not expensive.

So, what’s going on here?  Well, there are a couple of possibilities. Some of them are truly sinister.  For example, the entire quote system may no longer give quotes to all the people at the same time, and thus the premise that you’re trading against a fair market is a total farce.  Your quotes go in front of or behind others, and others trade in front of or behind you. What’s worse that activity could be happening selectively when it’s bad for you and good for someone else, and there’s no way for you to know!

There are, of course “innocent” explanations that do not involve intentional manipulation, but there’s no way to prove them.  When you no longer can reasonably depend on synchronization at the most-base level – that is, that a timestamp is a timestamp is a timestamp and all are accurate – then you’re not trading or investing any more, you are probably playing at a poker table with a marked deck and confederates sharing their cards with the other players on a selective basis to rip you off.

The SEC won’t stop this crap as is quite clear from the facts over more than a year’s time  so what options do you have left?

In a shocking representation of just how bad things are in Europe, the FT reports that major European industrial concern Siemens, pulled €500 million form a large French bank, which is not BNP and leaves just [SocGen|Credit Agricole] and deposited the money straight to the ECB. The implications of this are quite stunning, as it means that even European companies now refuse to work directly with their own banks, and somehow the ECB has become a direct lender/cash holder of only resort to private non-financial institutions! As Bloomberg reports further on the FT story, in total, Siemens has deposited between 4 billion euros and 6 billion euros, mostly through one-week deposits, with the ECB, FT says, cites the person. It isn’t clear from which bank Siemens withdrew its deposits, per the FT… but it is hardly difficult to figure out. BNP Paribas isn’t the bank involved, FT reports, cites unidentified person familiar with the bank. This story should be having far more impact on the EURUSD than any rumors about Greece lying it will fire all of its public workers only to make sure Eurobanks can survive one more day.

More from the FT:

 The company’s move came almost a year after Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate prepared itself for a future financial crisis by launching its own bank, an unusual move for an industrial group outside the car sector, where companies run big car financing and leasing businesses.

In an interview last December, Roland Châlons-Browne, chief executive of Siemens’ financial services unit, said its banking business would enable the group to tap the central bank for liquidity and deposit cash at the ECB.

“In the case of another financial crisis, we will be able to broaden our flexibility and take out risk with our own bank,” Mr Châlons-Browne said at the time.

Siemens does not only use the ECB as a haven; it also gets paid a slightly higher interest rate than it would get from a commercial bank.

The ECB paid an average interest rate last week of 1.01 per cent for its regular offers of one-week deposits, under which it withdraws from the financial system an amount of liquidity equivalent to the amount it has spent on eurozone government bonds.

Update: reader Arnold informs us that Siemens was lucky enough to be the functional equivalent of a Goldman Sachs ATM (you know, Goldman as an FDIC insured “depository” organization) when back in 2010 it got a bank license:

 At the end of 2010, Siemens was granted authorization by the German Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) to operate banking business in
Germany.

Through its loan business, Siemens Bank expands the product range of Siemens’ Financial Services unit, especially in sales financing. In addition, the deposit business of the bank increases flexibility in the area of corporate financing and provides the opportunity for the further optimization of risk management.

Siemens Bank is based in Munich and will be located in Germany only for the time being. Cross-border activities are planned in future. European countries will be the initial focus of such activities. Select emerging markets are additional focal points.

Siemens Bank is a subsidiary of Siemens AG and acts as an independent company. Nonetheless, it profits from its inclusion in the network of Siemens Group’s financial services companies. The bank employs about 100 people, mainly experts from the areas of risk management and risk controlling as well as specialists from loan origination & structuring.

Oh boy….

The European banks include French lenders Societe Generale , Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas .

“Apart from spot trading, all swaps and forwards trading (with the European banks) have been stopped,” one source who is familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The question is this: How much flow are we talking about here?

This is either a nothing or it’s a precursor to a really, really big…

Which is it?  I don’t know.  But the banks over in Europe this morning, especially BNP, are acting like it’s the “Big Bada-Boom” that’s inbound – right now.

The lack of transparency and demonstrated willingness to lie – including, in fact, European ministers openly stating that when things are bad you have to lie – is a huge problem.

There are many who claim that we can “ward off” crisis with the ECB and such stepping in to “save” people “as required.”  The fact of the matter is that we’re right back where we were in the 2007/08 mess when it became clear that lending people money who you know can’t pay you back is not a sustainable business model.

How long will we continue to play this game where we have 2% moves in the market in the space of hours or minutes and “contagion” continues to percolate while investor confidence is decimated?  Eventually this sort of volatility and the plethora of lies results in a bid collapse into one of those volatility spikes.

This is not how you get a market decline — it’s what generates crashes.

There is only one solution: The truth.  It involves acceptance of pain, which nobody is willing to do in the present tense, yet there is no way around it.  The longer we play “extend and pretend”, the more we lie and the longer the games go on the worse the situation becomes both here and abroad.

We in fact learned nothing from 2008 – we simply gave a bunch of whining children on Wall Street that had just smashed their fingers with a hammer a candy bar, and we didn’t even have the dollar to buy the candy with.

The banking gears of housing – Bank of America sells mortgage servicing rights on large loan pool to Fannie Mae.  400,000 loans shifted to Fannie Mae with $73 billion in unpaid principal.

Things just seem to get more perplexing with the housing market.  Back in August the Wall Street Journal discussed a deal between Fannie Mae and Bank of America.  The deal is odd even for the current banking system we have in place.  It was reported that Fannie Mae purchased the servicing rights to 400,000 loans for the grand total of $500 million.  Why would this be an issue you may ask?  Well first, Fannie Mae being a GSE does not specifically service mortgages so buying a pool of loans with unpaid principal of $73 billion seems out of place.  It also makes you wonder why a bank that has faced some troubles during the financial crisis would unload so many loans back to the government.  This concern clearly does not go unnoticed and a Representative from the housing battered state of California sent a letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) asking for more details on the deal.

The letter from Representative Darrell Issa

Source:  Oversight Committee

In the letter, it is noted that the bank decided to sell the portfolio for a loss because the value of the loans were expected to deteriorate even further:

“The loans have a 13% delinquency rate, and more than half of the loans are in troubled U.S. real estate markets.”

Is this another form of bailout going on here?  Why would the bank sell such a large loan portfolio back to Fannie Mae which is now under conservatorship?  The pool of mortgages are already showing an unusually high default rate.  The housing market is unlikely to bounce back soon and to the contrary, is already showing signs of a further correction ahead.

Read the rest at My Budget 360