Category: global investing

By Murray Gunn

The luxury British car maker Aston Martin has learned a hard lesson; namely, diamonds may be forever, but the market for $400,000 cars is not. A February 28 Guardian article confirms that since going public on the London Stock Exchange last October, Aston Martin’s shares have plummeted 40% amidst billions of dollars in losses. To be fair, some of the loss can be attributed to the company’s IPO costs, but we believe that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The IPO, in and of itself, is a splendid signal that the credit cycle, and the positive social mood which fueled a massive expansion of credit and rising stock values, is undergoing a bearish shift. A fall in Aston Martin’s fortunes equally represents a fall out of favor of one of the most recognizable bull market icons — Bond, James Bond.

Since Ian Fleming wrote the caddish secret agent into being in 1952 amidst the postwar bull market, Bond’s popularity has risen and fallen with the Dow. (See chapter 10 of Socionomic Studies of Society and Culture here.) And since Bond drove onto the big screen in 1964’s “Goldfinger” in his epochal Silver Birch DB5, the character has been synonymous with the luxury car brand.

In 2005, during the great stock market boom and one year before the 2006 blockbuster hit “Casino Royale,” Aston Martin experienced its best year on record and turned a profit for the first time in its 90-year history. Optimism was so high that a June 26, 2007 Motortrend piece affirmed that the company’s new owners, who just bought it for $1 billion, planned to “recover a good chunk of their investment through an initial public offering in the London Stock Exchanges within five years.” Those plans were soon derailed by the 2007 stock market peak and ensuing global financial crisis. Aston’s IPO hopes went up in smoke, as a December 1, 2008 Telegraph article revealed, the car maker’s drastic cut of “one-third of its workforce amidst the extraordinary market condition we all now face.”

Flash ahead to 2018, the 2007-9 Great Recession firmly in the rearview amidst a record-shattering bull market, and Aston Martin decides to “remake the Classic James Bond DB5” at a sky-high price of $3.5 million (Put it on “M’s” tab!). Coincidentally, the car maker announced take two of its plans for an IPO. In an August 29 report titled “Live and Let Die,” I published the following long-term chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average which showed five instances when Aston Martin’s insolvency or deep financial stress coincided with troughs in the global economy and wrote:

Aston Martin Lagonda’s first day of trading as a public company was on October 3, 2018 the exact day of the top in the Dow. Fittingly, global James Bond Day was October 5. The Dow then declined by 19% into December, while Aston’s stock plunged 40%, no doubt making investors feel like Goldfinger did when Bond took away his gold.

The 25th installment of the James Bond franchise, “Bond 25,” is slated to hit theaters in 2020. Meanwhile, Aston Martin hinted of a partnership with “aerospace experts to develop a new model with takeoff and landing capabilities.” (September 20 USA Today). I can envision no better symbol of soaring optimism than a flying Aston in the next Bond film. But should the villain of a bear climb into the passenger side of the market as it is whisking through the clouds, investors are going to wish for a Q-worthy ejector button to cast it out.

Discover how the popularity of James Bond films has fluctuated with the Dow Jones Industrial Average in this free chapter from Socionomic Studies of Society and Culture. Read the chapter now.

Jeffrey snider writes…

On February 7, the 3-month LIBOR rate (US$) fell sharply. Traders were, as various media outlets reported, stunned. All sorts of excuses were issued, the goal of them cumulatively to deny your lying eyes. Falling LIBOR couldn’t have been the market, especially eurodollar futures, anticipating a rate cut because these same people had been saying (and betting) for nearly two years how awesome the (global) economy was becoming.

Globally synchronized growth doesn’t lead to falling LIBOR, let alone rapidly falling.

Read Full post below

https://www.alhambrapartners.com/2019/03/27/china-partly-answers-for-why-markets-are-forecasting-even-more-powell-rate-cuts/

Russell Napier writes…..The good news is that we know what is coming next. The bad news is that we know what is coming next. The current war on deflation, a war lost if the shift in bond yields is to be believed, is bringing forth from the authorities not a new tactic but a whole new strategy – financial repression
(see Back To The Future, 5 th March newsletter). So, is the financial repression, now renamed modern monetary theory/makeup strategy/nominal GDP targeting, imminent as bond yields in New Zealand and Australia reach all-time lows and the ten-year bond yields of both Japan and Germany return to zero?

Subscribe to ERIC

To continue reading, please login to ERIC and if necessary, use the ‘Forgotten Password’ link.

Doug Noland writes….
This week’s FOMC meeting will be debated for years – perhaps even decades. The Fed essentially pre-committed to no rate hike in 2019. The committee downgraded both its growth and inflation forecasts. Having all at once turned of little consequence, we can now dismiss the 3.8% unemployment rate and the strongest wage growth in a decade. Moreover, the Fed announced it would be scaling back and then winding down balance sheet “normalization” by September. This put an impressive exclamation point on a historic policy shift since the December 19th meeting. At least for me, it hearkened back to a Rick Santelli moment: “What’s the Fed afraid of?”

Markets came into the meeting fully anticipating a dovish Fed. Our central bank returned to the old playbook of beating expectations. In the process, the Federal Reserve doused an already flaming fixed-income marketplace with additional fuel.

After trading to 3.34% during November 8th trading, ten-year Treasury yields ended this week a full 90 bps lower at 2.44%, trading Friday at the lowest yields since December 2017. Yields were down 15 bps this week – 17 bps from Tuesday’s (pre-Fed day) close – and 28 bps so far in March. And with three-month T-bill rates at 2.40%, the three-month/10-year Treasury curve flattened to the narrowest spread since 2007 (briefly inverting Friday). Five-year Treasury yields ended the week inverted 16 bps to three-month T-bills – and two-year Treasuries were inverted about eight bps.

Collapsing sovereign yields were a global phenomenon. Japan’s 10-year JGB yields declined four bps Friday to negative eight bps (-0.08%), the lowest yields since September 2016. With Germany’s Markit Manufacturing index sinking to the lowest level since 2012 (44.7), bund yields dropped seven bps to negative 0.015% – also lows going back to September 2016. Swiss 10-year yields sank 12 bps this week to negative 0.45%. Two-year German yields closed out the week at negative 0.57%. UK 10-year yields dropped 20 bps (1.01%), Spain 12 bps (1.07%) and France 11 bps (0.35%).

The destabilizing impact of the Fed’s shift back to an Uber-Dovish posture was more conspicuous by week’s end. The S&P500 dropped 1.9% in Friday trading, with financial stocks coming under heavy pressure. In three sessions, the KBW Bank Index was slammed 8.2% and the Broker/Dealers (NYSE Arca) lost 5.6%.

It wasn’t only the banks’ shares under pressure. Bank Credit default swap (CDS) prices reversed sharply higher this week, with European bank debt in the spotlight. Deutsche Bank 5yr CDS surged 24 bps this week to 168 bps, the largest weekly gain since late-November. UniCredit CDS jumped 22 bps (150bps), Intesa Sanpaulo 21 bps (159bps) and Credit Suisse 16 bps (84bps). An index of European subordinated bank debt surged 31 bps this week (to 177bps), the largest weekly gain since October 2014. Pressure on European bank CDS spilled over into European corporates. After trading to one-year lows in Tuesday’s session, a popular European high-yield CDS (iTraxx Crossover) reversed 22 bps higher in three sessions (to 281bps) – posting its worst week since mid-December.

Friday trading saw European CDS instability jump the Atlantic. Late-week losses saw most major U.S. bank CDS rise modestly for the week. After closing Tuesday near one-year lows, U.S. investment-grade corporate CDS jumped 10 bps in three sessions to end the week about 10 bps higher. This index suffered its largest weekly gain (higher protection costs) since the week of December 21 (reducing y-t-d decline to 20bps). The week saw junk bonds notably underperform. Sinking financial stocks, widening spreads and rising CDS prices fed into equities volatility. After ending last week at the lows (12.88) since early-October, the VIX popped to 16.48 (also the largest weekly gain since the week of December 21).

It’s now commonly accepted that the Federal Reserve erred in raising rates 25 bps in December. I hold the view that Chairman Powell had hoped to lower the “Fed put” strike price. The Fed was willing to disregard some market instability, hoping to begin the process of the markets standing on their own. The Fed just didn’t appreciate the degree of latent market fragility that had been accumulating over the years. I don’t fault them for trying.

In the name of promoting financial stability after a decade of extraordinary stimulus measures, it was prudent for the Fed to adhere to a course of gradual rate normalization even in the face of some market weakness. GDP expanded at a 3.4% rate in Q3 and slowed somewhat to 2.6% during Q4. After a decade-long expansion, periods of economic moderation should be expected (and welcomed).

Some analysts see this week’s dovish posture as part of a FOMC effort to rectify its December misdeeds. Markets now see about a 60% probability of a 2019 rate cut – with zero likelihood of a hike through January 2020. The Fed’s dot plot – still with one additional rate increase in 2020 – has lost all market credibility.

March 22 – Bloomberg (Matthew Boesler and Jeanna Smialek): “Federal Reserve policy makers have concluded that when in doubt, do no harm. Welcome to the new abnormal. Six months ago, U.S. central bankers thought they’d soon be returning to the days of on-target inflation, full employment and interest rates that, while lower than in decades past, would still need to rise into growth-restricting territory to keep things on track. But in a watershed moment, the Federal Reserve surprised investors… by slashing rate projections to show no hike this year. Officials signaled expectations for a slowdown in the economy… and they no longer expect inflation to rise above their 2% target. The move was a serious about-face. Since September 2017, they had signaled they would probably need to eventually raise rates above their estimate of the so-called neutral level for the economy… to slow the expansion and protect against the possibility of higher inflation. That was based on a longstanding view in the economics profession about how the economy works: If central bankers allow the unemployment rate to fall too far below its lowest sustainable level by keeping rates too low, then inflation will rise.”

There’s been a bevy of interesting analysis the past few days. The “New Abnormal” from the above Bloomberg article headline caught my attention. Responding to “New Normal” (Pimco) pontification, I titled an October 2009 CBB “The Newest Abnormal.” My argument almost a decade ago was that “activist” central banks were just doing what they had done repeatedly – only more aggressively: responding to bursting Bubbles with reflationary policymaking that would ensure the inflation of only bigger and more precarious Bubbles.

I didn’t back then believe it possible for central banks to orchestrate a successful inflation. I have great conviction in this analysis today. The popular notion of inflating out of debt problems is way too simplistic. Just inflate the general price level and reduce real debt burdens, as the thinking goes. The problem is that debt levels have expanded greatly, right along with securities and asset prices – and speculative excess. Aggregate measures of consumer prices, meanwhile, were left in the dust. The Great Credit Bubble has ballooned uncontrollably; asset price Bubbles have significantly worsened; and speculative Bubbles have become only more deeply embedded throughout global finance.

Bond markets were anything but oblivious to Bubble Dynamics back in 2007 – and have become only more keenly fixated here in 2019. I strongly argue that dysfunctional global markets are in a more precarious position today than in 2007, a view anything but diminished by this week’s developments. Wednesday’s statement and Powell press conference were viewed as confirming that the Fed is preparing to reinstitute aggressive policy stimulus.

With acute fragilities revealed in December, the Fed and global central bankers are on edge and scrambling. Markets see the Fed’s aggressive dovish push suggesting that the Fed – after December’s missteps – is now poised to err on the side of being early and aggressive with stimulus measures. In safe haven bond land, the Fed has evoked vivid images of monetary “shock and awe.”

Analysts are focusing on sovereign yields and an inverted Treasury curve as foreshadowing recession. I would counter with the view that bond markets appreciate global Bubble fragilities and are now pricing in the inevitability of rate cuts and new QE programs. Yield curves (at home and abroad) are more about market dynamics and prospective monetary policy than the real economy. As such, the strong correlations between safe haven and risk assets are no confounding mystery. Safe haven assets these days have no fear of “risk on.” After all, surging global risk markets only exacerbate systemic risk, ensuring more problematic Bubbles, central bankers operating with hair triggers, and the near certainty of aggressive future monetary stimulus.

Friday’s market instability had market participants searching for an explanation. Is there a significant development moving markets? Negative news coming from the China/U.S. trade front?

There could be something out there spooking the markets. Or perhaps the big story of the week was that Fed Uber-Dovishness pushed global bond markets and fixed-income derivatives toward dislocation. From the above Bloomberg article: “Federal Reserve policy makers have concluded that when in doubt, do no harm.” Maybe the Fed, trying too hard to compensate for December, is Doing Harm to market stability.

DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach (from Reuters): “This U-Turn – on nothing fundamentally changing – is unprecedented. Three months ago, we were on ‘autopilot’ with the balance sheet – and now the bond market is priced for a rate cut this year. The reversal in their stance is stunning.”

Perhaps the disorderly drop in safe haven yields has led to a problematic widening of Credit spreads. The easy returns being made long higher-yielding Credit instruments versus a short in Treasuries have come to an abrupt conclusion. Could serious problems be unfolding in the derivatives markets, along with major losses for levered players caught on the wrong side of illiquid and rapidly moving markets. Is the Fed’s stunning “U-turn” market destabilizing – with great irony, fomenting “risk off” deleveraging?

What is the Federal Reserve’s reaction function? What factors will be driving policy decisions going forward? The Fed set rates at about zero (0 to 25bps) in January 2009 and left them unchanged for six years. The Fed then raised rates 25 bps in December 2015, 25 bps in December 2016 – and then cautiously increased rates six more times spaced over the next three years. The Fed’s balance sheet was roughly stable from Q4 2014 through Q4 2017 and has since been in gradual/predictable runoff for the past five quarters. For years now, Fed policy has been usually certain. Rate and balance sheet “normalization” were to proceed at an extraordinarily measured pace. No surprises. Bypassing a tightening of financial conditions, the “autopilot” Fed was conducive to aggressive market positioning/speculation (and leveraging).

An unusual era of monetary policy stability/predictability formally ended Wednesday. Balance sheet “normalization” is being brought to an early conclusion. Markets now assume the next rate move is lower. And with the Fed apparently turning its focus to persistently undershooting consumer price inflation, it is reasonable to assume it’s only a matter of time until the Fed resorts once again to QE. But when and at what quantity?

Especially as three years of rate “normalization” ends with Fed funds at only 2.25% to 2.50%, markets well-recognize there’s meager stimulus potential available in rate policy. Will the Fed even bother with rate cuts – or be compelled to move directly to QE? Suddenly, the future of monetary policy appears awfully murky.

Come the next serious stimulus push, it will be the Fed’s balance sheet called upon to do the heavy lifting. And, for those pondering a likely catalyst, I’d say look no further than a global market accident – omen December. As such, it now matters greatly that QE has evolved from an extreme policy response necessary to counter the “worst crisis since the Great Depression” – to a prominent tool in the Fed’s (and global central banking) toolkit readily available to counter risks of economic weakness and stock market instability.

Throw in the concept of late-cycle “Terminal Excess” – appreciating that policymakers, from Beijing to Tokyo to Frankfurt, London, Canberra, Toronto, Washington and beyond, are prolonging a most precarious cycle – and one can build a solid case for big trouble and big QE brewing. With this in mind, it’s not difficult to get quite concerned for the stability of global bond markets, along with securities, derivatives and asset markets more generally. And with markets unsettled, it probably didn’t help to have the largest ever monthly federal deficit ($234bn), with the y-t-d deficit after five months ($544bn) running 40% ahead of fiscal 2018 – or that President Trump announced the nomination of Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve.

read full article

http://creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com/2019/03/weekly-commentary-doing-harm-with-uber.html

Steen Jakobsen of Saxo Bank writes
My view has long been that monetary policy is misguided and unproductive, but the difference now is that we are reaching the most major inflection point since the global financial crisis as central bank policy medicine rapidly loses what little potency it had. In the meantime, the harm to the patient has only been adding up: the economic system is suffering fatigue from QE-driven inequality, malinvestment, a lack of productivity, never-ending cheap money and a total lack of accountability. 

The next policy steps will see central banks operating as mere auxiliaries to governments’ fiscal impulse. The policy framework is dressed up as “Modern Monetary Theory”, and it will be arriving soon and in force, perhaps after a summer of non-improvement or worse to the current economic landscape. What would this mean? No real improvement in data, a credit impulse too weak and small to do anything but to stabilise said data and a geopolitical agenda that continues to move away from a multilateral framework and devolves into a range of haphazard nationalistic agendas. 
 
For the record, MMT is neither modern, monetary nor a theory. It is a the political narrative for use by central bankers and politicians alike. The orthodox version of MMT aims to maintain full employment as its prime policy objective, with tax rates modulated to cool off any inflation threat that comes from spending beyond revenue constraints (in MMT, a government doesn’t have to worry about balanced budgets, as the central bank is merely there to maintain targeted interest rates all along the curve if necessary).

Most importantly, however, MMT is the natural policy response to the imbalances of QE and to the cries of populists. Given the rise of Trumpism and democratic socialism in the US and populist revolts of all stripes across Europe, we know that when budget talks start in May (in Europe, after the Parliamentary elections) and October (in the US), governments around the world will be talking up the MMT agenda: infrastructure investment, reducing inequality, and reforming the tax code to favour more employment at the low end.

We also know that the labour market is very tight as it is and if there is another push on fiscal spending, the supply of labour and resources will come up short. Tor Svelland of Svelland Capital, who joins Charles and I at the Gateway to China event, has made exactly this point. The assumption of a continuous flow of resources stands at odds with the reality of massive underinvestment. 

Central bankers and indirect politicians are hoping/wishing for inflation, and in 2020 they will get it – in spades. Unfortunately, it will be the wrong kind: headline inflation with no real growth or productivity. A repeat of the 1970s, maybe?

Read Full Post below

https://www.home.saxo/insights/content-hub/articles/2019/03/21/the-fed-has-surrendered-and-heres-what-comes-next

Thus will end the central banks’ bombastic hubris and the public’s faith in central banks’ godlike powers.

Having fixed the liquidity crisis of 2008-09 and kept a perversely unequal “recovery” staggering forward for a decade, central banks now believe there is no crisis they can’t defeat: Liquidity crisis? Flood the global financial system with liquidity. Interest rates above zero? Create trillions out of thin air and use the “free money” to buy bonds. Mortgage and housing markets shaky? Create another trillion and use it buy up mortgages.

And so on. Every economic-financial crisis can be fixed by creating trillions of out thin air, except the one we’re entering–the exhaustion of credit. Central banks, like generals, always prepare to fight the last war and believe their preparation insures their victory.

China’s central bank created over $1 trillion in January alone to flood China’s faltering credit system with new credit-currency. Pouring new trillions into the financial system has always restarted the credit system, triggering renewed borrowing and lending that then powered yet another cycle of heedless consumption and mal-investment–oops, I meant development.

Read More

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar19/exhaustion3-19.html

by SRSrocco

It seems as if investors are no longer willing to finance the U.S. Shale Oil Industry Black Hole.  And why should they?  One of the largest shale players in the Permian, Pioneer Resources, suffered its eighth consecutive year of negative free cash flow.  In 2018, Pioneer spent $541 million more on capital expenditures than it made from cash from operations and if we add up all the eight years, it’s a grand total of $6.8 billion in negative free cash flow

Read More

https://srsroccoreport.com/the-bloodbath-in-u-s-shale-stocks-continues-worst-is-yet-to-come/

Callum Thomas writes in topdown charts….The key takeaways from the weekly sentiment snapshot are:

-Investors appear ‘reluctant bulls’; bullish on technicals, yet bearish on fundamentals

-Bond investors are in agreement on the softening fundamentals, and remain very bullish overall

-A big breakout in bonds could be on the cards in the near term if recent history repeats

Read Full post

https://www.topdowncharts.com/single-post/2019/03/18/Sentiment-Snapshot-Bullish-Technicals-Bearish-Fundamentals

Swerving around from two year long recession which ended in 2016 to one of the best performers in emerging markets, Brazil under the newly elected right wing populist President Jair Bolsonaro is refreshed and optimistic about its future which is also evident from the rally in the Brazilian markets.

Many investors are investing in emerging markets which is currently led by Brazil in order to gain from potentially weaker US Dollar. EM countries are witnessing global liquidity turning into favour and countries tied to China’s shifting buying preferences are gaining most from this mix.

Gordon Fraser of BlackRock Inc. says, “Emerging market equities are highly correlated with currencies and bonds so domestic players will benefit from weaker dollar. When a currency weakens or bond yields increase, typically equities go down. So if we have become positive on a currency, firstly a perfect way to express it is through an equity. The key things riding the dollar last year are now out.” Bloomberg cited

Long term bulls on Brazil and buying on dips have been giving them profits until now and they expect the rally to continue for quite some time. However there is a flip side to Brazil. The growth is expected to stay sluggish and people’s confidence depend on how the reform challenges are dealt with. Bloomberg cites that the Gross Domestic Product expanded 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, down from a revised 0.5 percent in three months through September, the national statistics agency said Thursday. The result was the slowest quarterly pace since the third quarter of 2017 and was in line with the median estimate from economists surveyed by Bloomberg. In the full year of 2018, GDP rose 1.1 percent, same as prior year.

With slow growth and inflation below target, markets do not see a tightening cycle in Brazil before mid-2019. The foreign reserves dipped from nearly $383 billion in May 2018 to $374.7 billion in December. That is the lowest since December 2017 but still covers nearly 15 months of imports and is equivalent to nearly 9 times short – term external debt.

Brazil today still outperforms other emerging markets and its currency, the real, rose since the second round of voting on October 29, 2018. The MSCI Brazil index, which fell 8 percent in 2018 while MSCI EM as a whole dropped 17.5%, is up 16.5% in 2019 versus a 4.5% gain for MSCI EM. The optimism was boosted when the pension reform plan was announced. Current retirement age is 55 and pension reform retirement ages is expected to be 62 for women and 65 for men. This is going to amount up as 1 trillion real in savings.

The two right wing populist leaders, Trump and Bolsonaro meeting is considered crucial for both the countries and ways to enhance of bilateral ties will be on the agenda. US is Brazil’s second biggest trade partner after China. Matias Spektor, professor of international relations at Sao Paulo’s FGV business school said in a seminar, “Knowing that Bolsonaro has Trump on his side will be important for investors, especially if Brazil has a bumpy financial year.” Win Thin, global head of emerging market strategy with Brown Brothers Harriman said, “To someone who has been following Brazil for three decades, the huge rightward shift is simply amazing.” He added, “With inflation likely to remain low and central bank on hold for much of this year, we think Brazil will continue to outperform.” Brazil has played its card well in the recent US china dispute by staying under the radar and still a beneficiary of a this trade dispute as china shifted some of its agri buying from US to Brazil.

(with inputs from Apra Sharma)

Tyler Kling writes…..
Credit spreads have narrowed significantly since the beginning of the year. Check out the graph below via Citi Bank.

Credit spreads and stocks move together because all market moves are governed by liquidity conditions. When liquidity conditions tighten (credit spreads widen) the cost of capital goes up, and therefore the returns investors receive in equities relative to other assets looks less attractive.

It’s important to stay in tune with liquidity conditions because that’s how you give yourself a chance to actually time the market. Stanley Druckenmiller earned his breathtaking track record by paying close attention to liquidity in the financial system. (Quote below)

I never use valuation to time the market. I use liquidity considerations and technical analysis for timing. Valuation only tells me how far the market can go once a catalyst enters the picture to change the market direction.

Read More

https://macro-ops.com/bear-markets-and-liquidity-conditions/