Flip Flop Futures Thursday – What Next?
by Phil - November 3rd, 2011 7:59 am
You got to be crazy, you gotta have a real need
You gotta sleep on your toes and when you’re on the street
You got to be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight
You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking – Floyd
You have got to be crazy to play this market!
Forget dogs – it was the early birds who made money this morning as I finally had a web connection at home and, as we expected due to the time changes, our usual 3am trade came late in the Futures as relentlessly bad news (see Member Chat for details) sank the indexes all the way back down to Tuesday’s close.
We reviewed all the news, both good and bad and I decided it was worth taking a chance on some futures long plays at 3:48 in Member Chat, saying:
The RUT futures are holding 715 so I like a long there (/TF) with tight stops below.
Nas Futures are holding 2,275 and I like a bullish play (/NQ) with tight stops on that line.
Oil is at $91.37 and that may be the low but it’s gasoline we like to get bullish on into the weekend and gasoline (/RB) is down to $2.5999 so let’s go bullish there over $2.60 with tight stops.
EU opens in 10 minutes and their futures are down 2.5% and I could be wrong but I think we’re being manipulated lower into the ECB meeting and the Merkozy statement on Greece.
As you can see from the chart, that was pretty good timing and we stopped out 3 hours later, at…
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DiggThe Curious Case of the Fed Analyst Fired After Asking Too Many Questions
by ilene - April 4th, 2011 5:55 pm
Why was William Bergman, analyst with the Chicago Fed for 14 years, fired? Was it because he asked too many questions on a sensitive issue? We don’t know, but Jr. Deputy Accountant is investigating and will keep us posted. Unless she disappears (oh no!), in which case we’ll have to draw our own conclusions. - Ilene
The Curious Case of the Fed Analyst Fired After Asking Too Many Questions
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Ed. note: the following might a bit long and F-bomb lite for regular JDA readers. I ask you to overlook that, grab a beer, get comfy and read anyway.
Before we get into the story of William Bergman, an analyst with the Chicago Fed for 14 years of his life, we need to get the background on the story he was sniffing out.
Some of his work at the Chicago Fed includes The New Midwest in Recession and Recovery, The Revival of the Rust Belt: Fleeting Fancy or Durable Good? and 1995 Economic Outlook: 1994 Will Be a Tough Act to Follow. Without calling him bland (we’d never be so rude), let’s just say he was good at his job, which as a Fed analyst is to pump out quality droll nonsense that appeals only to central bankers and economy nerds. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.
On August 2, 2001, a non-routine letter went out from the Fed Board of Governors to the 12 regional banks. The letter reminded them that "among other things, the review of SARs assists in the identification of potential supervisory issues at banking organizations, provides information for determining compliance with relevant laws and regulations, and provides useful information on suspicious activity being identified by the reporting institutions."
Suspicious Activity Reports (here’s what one looks like), while not specific to terrorism, can be useful for tracking terrorism activity and financing based on reports the regional Fed banks receive from banks they supervise. The August 2011 letter went deeper:
Reserve Banks must continue to conduct a thorough and timely review of all material SARs filed by supervised financial institutions in their districts. This review is an integral component of the supervisory function. A periodic, comprehensive review of SARs will assist Reserve Banks in identifying suspicious or suspected criminal activity occurring at or through supervised financial institutions; provide the information necessary to
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Kyle Bass With David Faber: Bernanke’s ZIRP Is An ‘Inescapable Trap;’ Muni Bond Bloodbath Beckons But “States Will NOT Default”
by ilene - February 23rd, 2011 3:05 am
Courtesy of The Daily Bail
CNBC Video – Kyle Bass with David Faber – Feb. 16, 2011
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Video – Part 2
Municipal bond defaults on the local level are likely and investors would be better off avoiding them, according to Kyle Bass, managing director of Hayman Capital.
Bass said he generally agrees with the call by famed banking analyst Meredith Whitney, who said as many as 100 defaults are likely that will cost more than $100 billion in damage.
Though Whitney’s call has prompted substantial backlash from her colleagues in the industry, Bass said the question is more a matter of degree.
"There are going to be a number of muni defaults, but it’s where you draw the line. Will states be allowed to default? Will legislation be introduced to allow states to restructure? I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe states will not default."
Geithner Politicizes the Fed, Warns Congress to Not do the Same; Idiocies and Ironies; Economist James Galbraith Unfit to Teach
by ilene - November 22nd, 2010 4:37 pm
Mish discusses how Geithner Politicizes the Fed, Warns Congress to Not do the Same; Idiocies and Ironies; Economist James Galbraith Unfit to Teach. – Ilene
Courtesy of Mish
The hypocrisy of treasury secretary Tim Geithner would be stunning except for the fact hypocrisy from Geithner is pretty much an every day occurrence.
Geithner is blasting Congress for politicizing the Fed, while doing the same thing himself. To top it off, the Fed itself is politicizing the Fed by interfering and commenting on Fiscal policy while bitching about Congress commenting on monetary policy.
Please consider Geithner Warns Republicans Against Politicizing Fed.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner warned Republicans against politicizing the Federal Reserve and said the Obama administration would oppose any effort to strip the central bank of its mandate to pursue full employment.
“It is very important to keep politics out of monetary policy,” Geithner said in an interview airing on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” this weekend. “You want to be very careful not to take steps that hurt our credibility.”
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke defended the monetary stimulus in a speech in Frankfurt today and in a meeting with U.S. senators earlier this week.
The best way to underpin the dollar and support the global recovery “is through policies that lead to a resumption of robust growth in a context of price stability in the United States,” Bernanke said in his speech.
The asset purchases will be used in a way that’s “measured and responsive to economic conditions,” Bernanke said. Fed officials are “unwaveringly committed to price stability” and don’t seek inflation higher than the level of “2 percent or a bit less” that most policy makers see as consistent with the Fed’s legislative mandate, he said.
Bernanke Comments on Fiscal Policy
Flashback, October 4, 2010: MarketWatch reports Bernanke calls for tougher budget rules
In a speech delivered at the annual meeting of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council and devoid of comments on monetary policy, Bernanke said that fiscal rules might be a way to impose discipline, particularly if those rules are transparent, ambitious, focused on what the legislature can control directly, and are embraced by the public.
“A fiscal rule does not guarantee improved budget outcomes; after all, any rule imposed by a legislature can be revoked or circumvented by the same legislature,” Bernanke said,
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Fed Privately Lobbies Senate to Kill Audit; What You Can Do!
by ilene - May 4th, 2010 2:46 pm
Fed Privately Lobbies Senate to Kill Audit; What You Can Do!
Courtesy of Mish
A bill sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson to thoroughly audit the Fed, passed the House. However in a brazen move that ought to offend the sensibilities of every citizen, the Fed is lobbying Senate members to water down the bill so that it is meaningless.
The Huffington Post tells the story in Fed Privately Lobbying Against Audit.
The Federal Reserve is privately lobbying against a bipartisan Senate amendment that would open the central bank to an audit by the Government Accountability Office, according to documents distributed to Senate offices by a Fed official.
In order to obtain the documents, HuffPost agreed not to reveal the name of the Federal Reserve official who did the specific lobbying in question.
"As I mentioned, we believe that the bipartisan Corker-Merkley provision in the Dodd Bill is quite strong and addresses issues of transparency and disclosure without impinging on the independence of monetary policy," the official goes on.
Merkley teamed with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on an audit provision, but Merkley himself says he’d prefer to go further. "I appreciate Representative [Alan] Grayson’s concerns over accountability at the Federal Reserve. I have been a strong proponent of Fed reform and voted against the re-confirmation of Ben Bernanke because the Fed has been so lax in using its regulatory powers," Merkley said in a statement to HuffPost, responding to an analysis from Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) showing that the Senate bill did not meaningfully expand transparency.
The Fed argument is a replay of a tactic that the bank tried in the House. Instead of outright opposition, the Fed backed an amendment in the lower chamber from Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.), which the bank said would expand transparency but not interfere with monetary policy. It became clear, however, that the amendment would not expand transparency and was an attempt to defeat the audit in general. The Watt amendment was soundly defeated.
The Corker-Merkley amendment is the Senate version of the Watt amendment and the Fed is once again arguing that the broader amendment will impinge on the independence of monetary policy.
"The Sanders amendment, however, would directly interfere with monetary policy," argues the Fed official. "The amendment removes the current statutory protection for core monetary policy activities from GAO audit and would permit the GAO to
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Which Way Wednesday – Fed Edition
by Phil - April 28th, 2010 8:10 am
Wheee, that was fun!
Can we do it again? Maybe but we got the pullback we were looking for and, as I said about cashing out our bullish plays at 300% this weekend – GREED KILLS! In fact, the title of this weekend’s Wrap-Up was "Why Does this Rally Give Me The Creeps," where I posted a Free TZA Disaster Hedge which made 90% in 48 hours – Bernanke is not the only one who can give away FREE MONEY!
We were already bearish coming into yesterday morning as my Monday post told you we were going to flip bearish at 10 am that morning (and you can read these things pre-market if you subscribe) and I told you in yesterday’s post that Greece and Goldman concerns can vanish in a puff of smoke when the Fed announces that money is still free in America (as long as you are Greece or GS) and that we would be doing one of our famous 566% upside plays on the downturn.
In my 10 am Alert to Members, I laid out a very nice SSO spread that came in very cheap in the afternoon. We took our profits from our 3 major short plays (TZA calls, DIA puts and Oil shorts) off the table and we did a little bottom fishing with TBT, DIA, Oil and XOM so pretty aggressively bullish as we got down to that 11,000 line. We would love to have more of a sell-off but it’s not like we haven’t seen this movie before – the bears ALWAYS get their heads chopped off every time they think it’s safe to leave the cave so why not bet on it happening? Just to be safe, though, I did lay out 5 plays that make 500% or more if the market falls in a special post for Members this morning, our famous "disaster hedges." Hopefully, we won’t need them…
Yesterday wasn’t a disaster at all - just a simple pullback after a huge run. If Greece gets worse, we can fall more, but I doubt the EU will let it and if Goldman gets worse, it can take down the financials but I doubt that will happen and if the Fed tightens policy and stops giving the banks free money which the banks only use to lever up into new derivative plays to destroy what’s left of our economy… I’m sorry, that last one was so ridiculous I have to stop. The…
Wednesday’s Worry – World Wide Cash Crunch
by Phil - March 31st, 2010 8:37 am
Hugo Chavez is running low on cash.
Should you care that he just had to withdraw $5Bn from reserves, sending them to a 10-month low and down 19% to $28.35Bn? Well it’s not just Venezuela but they are a good example of what’s happening around the World as even oil-rich nations can no longer prop up their economies and will have to begin competing with the US, Europe and Japan to borrow money on the international markets. Venezuela may have external debt financing needs this year of as much as $19 billion and as much as $22 billion in 2011 should authorities choose not to use non-reserve savings estimated at $41.1 billion, according to Morgan Stanley. “Short of some break in Venezuela’s current dynamic, the economy may be faced with a severe dollar crunch as early as this year,” Pardelli and Volberg said. “The dollar crunch may prompt the authorities to attempt to buy time by drawing down their hard currency savings, issuing debt or significantly ratcheting up policy heterodoxy.”
Greece needs $15.6Bn by the end of May and that much again in August and November. Seven-year notes sold by the government this week fell even after the European Union and the International Monetary Fund crafted an aid package that would be triggered should the nation be unable to raise sufficient cash from capital markets to cover its financing needs. Greece may pay about 13 billion Euros more in interest on the debt it sells this year than it would have to had yields stayed at their pre-crisis levels relative to Germany’s.
The UK will be spending 10% of their tax revenues just to pay the interest on their debt as debt itself soars to 90% of GDP with debt now costing the UK more than their Defence and Transportation budgets combined. Neighboring Ireland is looking at a $110Bn bill over the next 12 months to stabilize it’s bad banks – and that’s AFTER giving the banks a 47% haircut on the value of the assets the government will be picking up. This will not be counted as an addition to Ireland’s already $95Bn in debt for 2010 because, technically, they are buying an asset - even if the asset is toxic. It’s the same trick our Fed uses every month to pretend things are fine…
Fed President Richard Fisher says the U.S. can’t ignore the effect of the…
Tempting Tuesday – Waiting on the Fed
by Phil - March 16th, 2010 8:13 am
The dollar is diving and the futures are flying this morning!
Word is that the Fed will remain doveish in their 2:15 statement today with no sign of tightening in the near future. That has (as of 7:30) rallied gold 1.5% to $1,115 and oil is back over $80 and copper is $3.35 again while the Euro jumps back to $1.375 and even the British Pound squeezes the hell out of the shorts as it flies from $1.497 at 3:30 to $1.514 (1%) in 4 hours, which is a pretty big move for FOREX!
The EU also helped themselves by laying out a groundwork for a financial lifeline to debt-stricken Greece, breaking a taboo against aid to cash-strapped governments in order to avert a crisis for the euro. Officials from the 16 countries using the currency worked out a strategy for emergency loans in case Greece’s plan for 4.8 billion euros ($6.6 billion) in tax increases and wage cuts fails to stave off fiscal disaster. “We clarified the technical arrangements that would enable us to take coordinated action which could be swiftly put into place in the event it is necessary,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters late yesterday after leading a meeting of Euro-area finance officials in Brussels.
The EU is also meeting to discuss ways to reign in hedge funds and credit-default swaps but the revised bill from Chris Dodd is now so watered down by compromise that it no longer requires regulators to agree that excluding a swap from being cleared “is necessary and appropriate for the reduction of systemic risk.” So what’s the point? The problem is that there are $605 TRILLION Dollars of CDS’s written against a Global GDP of $50Tn. Usually, it’s a red flag for the police when a person insures their home for 12 times what it’s worth, right?
Hexagon Securities LLC and at least 19 other financial firms are pressing regulators to force swaps clearinghouses to lower entry barriers in order to improve competition in a $605 trillion derivatives market dominated by the world’s biggest banks. They also seek tougher conflict-of-interest laws to ensure that a bank’s derivatives desk doesn’t influence clearinghouse decisions that could shut out new competitors. ROFL – move to Russia, you Commies! This is America, where big banks rule and "firms with less than $5Bn net worth" drool! See, my daughters taught me that one…
Which Way Wednesday – Bernanke’s Turn at Bat
by Phil - February 24th, 2010 8:26 am
Bernanke USUALLY boosts the market.
Will he be able to restore confidence today? He’ll be speaking to the House Committee on Financial Services in a hearing titled: "Monetary Policy and the State of the Economy," which used to be called the Humphrey Hawkins Testimony - and that means it’s time for another episode of my favorite TV show – something I call "When Ron Paul Attacks." Ron Paul has been on a roll lately and today is the perfect day for him to use his 5 minutes to build a platform for his 2012 run at the White House.
Yesterday was disappointing, to say the least as we blew all of our bounce levels EXCEPT the Russell, which finished right on our 625 line. That makes the RUT our canary in the coal mine today as we’ll use it to see which way the market winds are blowing. We didn’t mind yesterday’s sell-off as it was led by a 2.2% drop in Basic Materials and Energy – two sectors we were betting against anyway and we just upped our bets against CRE after skipping most of February as the timing hadn’t seemed right.
Now we are getting a flood of bad new in the Commercial Real Estate space including a report from Real Capital Analytics that shows the Commercial Mortgage Default rate more than doubled in Q4 – from 1.8% to 3.4% and is projected to hit 5.4% this year. “The level of distress continues to rise irrespective of improving economic trends,” Sam Chandan, Real Capital’s global chief economist. Almost $1.1 trillion in commercial loans and $211 billion in apartment loans were held by U.S. banks on Dec. 31, according to Real Capital. “With the concentration of commercial mortgages in small and community banks, there is a potential spillover that will impinge on their ability to make loans to small businesses and families,” Chandan said.
The Congressional Oversight Panel on the financial system bailouts said in a Feb. 10 report that “the ultimate impact of the commercial real estate whole loan problem will fall disproportionately on smaller regional and community banks” that have higher concentrations of such loans. “Some community banks seemed to have abandoned, or never really practiced, sound risk management” by lending too much on real estate in their local markets, David A. Hendler, New York-based analyst for CreditSights Inc., said in a Feb. 22 note.
Meanwhile,…
Federally Frightened Friday
by Phil - February 19th, 2010 7:56 am
The Fed raised the discount rate – Big Deal!
As I said in my Weekly Wrap-Up, recessions are for wimps and kudos to the Fed for finally pulling out the stick after all the soft talking they’ve been doing. Meanwhile, I do not see what all the fuss is about – I did the math for Members last night and banks borrow about $89Bn at the discount window on a good day and 0.25% of $87Bn is a grand total of $22M – this is NOT going cause the fall of Western Civilization people! What it does do is stop making the Fed the lender of first resort, which was never supposed to be their function in the first place.
The MSM should be more concerned with the end of the TALF, which is where the Fed buys up toxic assets from the banks at face value (we’ll all be paying for that later) and they just announced that the Fed’s holding of Mortgage-Backed Securities went over the $1Tn mark yesterday, bringing the Fed’s Balance Sheet to $2.25Tn of very questionable assets that they’ve bought for us from the banksters.
Speaking of banksters – Kudos to Matt Taibbi for his excellent Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle. As I said to Members, if it wasn’t for Matt and Dylan Ratigan, I would have to be writing about this stuff instead of following the markets. Thank goodness there are a few top-notch people investigating this nonsense with the ability to communicate their findings in a way that makes it interesting:
The nation’s six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007.
The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(