We’ve been talking about this stuff for awhile now here on TRB, but no one was on top of the sovereign debt minefield like the Zero Hedge gang. In case you missed ignored it, they’ve basically been handing you what the market is awakening to now on a platter.
Bad news from Harrisburg, PA to Southern Europe to Los Angeles today. And those jobs numbers certainly didn’t help. We should be at roughly 0% employment by 2016 at this rate.
The Dow is down around 200 as we speak, flirting with the psychologically meaningful 10,000 level.
City workers and union members won a victory against financial prudence in Los Angeles today.
The city council spent all day yesterday discussing drastic cuts made necessary by LA’s $208 million budget gap. The city’s budget analysis proposed around 1,000 job cuts to save money.
And so the municipal unions went wild, packing the meeting with hundreds of workers.
In response, the city council voted to postpone budget-related layoffs for 30 days.
Frighteningly, on the same day the council members voted against cutting jobs and consolidating the disability, human services and environmental affairs department, it also agreed to discuss making jobs cuts in the police and fire departments.
Even worse, LA council members are talking about "unconventional ways" of addressing their looming financial crisis.
"If I’m facing hard times . . . I’m going to go to my uncles. I’m going to go to my aunt. I’m going to ask them to borrow money," Councilman Jose Huizar said, according to the LA Times. "But I’m going to tell them: ‘You know, I’ve got this ’67 Chevy. I could sell it a year from now and maybe I’ll pay you back with that.’ Can we do anything like that?"
The problem, of course, is that LA’s uncle is the State of California, which is facing a giant budgetary crisis of its own. It doesn’t have the money to bail out LA. And muni bond investors are unlikely to love the idea that LA will find some way to raise cash in the future to compensate for its inability to restrain spending now.
Will the ratings agencies wait 30 days before slamming LA? We’ll see.
When a politician says something is "not an option" that generally means it is (or soon will be). Sometimes it means it is all but certain. With that in mind, please consider Mayor Villaraigosa says no bankruptcy for the city.
With city officials declaring that "bankruptcy is not an option," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released a long-term plan for the city’s finances Thursday, including several billion dollars in potential savings and possible layoffs of 1,000 workers.
In a letter to City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, the mayor and City Council leaders called for the start of steps needed to make layoffs and perform studies on dealing with this year’s continuing shortfall of $200 million and the projected $400 million deficit for next year.
"This mayor has no interest in going down the road to bankruptcy," said Deputy Mayor Matt Szabo, who has been assigned the task of developing the overall financial strategy for the city.
My Comment: It is irrelevant what the mayor wants now. The fate was sealed years ago with pensions. LA came to a fork in the road, and selected the road named "Bankruptcy". Now the mayor says LA has no interest going down that road. Well it is too late for that now, unless unions are ready to do some serious negotiation.
That’s the kicker, LA has no choice in the matter other than the mayor’s willingness to ask the unions for concessions. Whether or not LA goes bankrupt depends entirely on the response from the unions regarding wages and pension benefits.
The five-page letter from Villaraigosa, also signed by Council President Eric Garcetti and council members Bernard Parks, Jan Perry, Greig Smith and Dennis Zine, sets the stage for a series of decisions to reduce spending in the city’s $7.01 billion budget.
There are no plans to ask voters for a tax increase, but the mayor is looking at whether a ballot proposal will be needed to reform the city’s pension system.
My Comment: Good luck with that. You will need it.
Santana’s office also released a report showing the city’s revenues continue to decline, particularly in consumer-sensitive areas such as hotel and sales tax. Also, holiday season sales were much less than expected.
My Comment: Welcome to frugality, the new reality.…
In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread. It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a Lord of the Flies type of summer camp. And so here I am, many decades later, still uneasy as the final page of the August calendar flies away in a hot Santa Ana wind, and a great hellfire closes in on the far eastern reaches of Los Angeles, and the American money system falls into a peculiar limbo, and every fifth person is out of work, or going bankrupt, or glugging down the seawater of default, or being denied coverage by health insurance that he-or-she has already shelled out ten grand for this year, or getting shot in a trailer park.
I was in Los Angeles for a few days last week, as chance had it, marveling at the odd disposition of things there. I’ve been there many times over the years, but you forget how overwhelmingly weird it is. Altogether the LA metro area has the ambience of a garage the size of Rhode Island where someone happened to leave the engine running. To say that LA is all about cars is kind of like saying the Pacific Ocean is all about water. But one forgets the supernatural scale of the freeways, the tsunamis of vehicles, the cosmic despair of the traffic jams. The vistas of present-day LA make the Blade Runner vision of things look quaint in comparison.
You motor out of the LAX airport – personally, I love the name "LAX" because it so beautifully describes the collective ethos of the place – and you discover quickly that the taxi cab’s windows are not that dirty, it’s the air itself colored brown like miso soup. Going north on the 405 freeway, you see the looming Moloch of the downtown skyline through the brown miso soup. And you begin to understand why the products of the film industry are so fixated on the theme of machine apocalypse. Downtown LA looks like just such a gigantic machine as the FX crews would dream up, as if a day will come when those gleaming mirrored office towers will pull themselves
Things are escalating quickly... with US Treasuries beginning to look a lot like JGBs: the 5Y soared +18bps to the highest since August 2011, the 10Y +13.5bps touches 2.32% widest since March 2012, 30Y +8bps, and credit markets are getting monkey-hammered. There is no joy in Newport Beachville.
5Y the worst!!
Credit majorly underperforming...
Nikkei surged (on JPY weakness) and has corrected (even as JPY remains at its lows)...
No change to the statement as expected and Ben is speaking now. Basically he is dovish – one takeaway which I mentioned quite a few months ago but he reiterated today. The 6.5% unemployment rate is a threshold NOT a trigger. What that means is if inflation is benign when 6.5% unemployment returns, the Fed will be in no rush to raise interest rates. i.e. the goalposts are soft, nor hard. The market rallied on that… but it's not new news really.
Also the majority of members do not anticipate selling MBS off the balance sheet – this is part and parcel with the view that the balance sheet will not...
We no longer have a free market. The world’s financial asset prices have become a plaything of central banks and the sovereign wealth funds of a few emerging powers.
Julian Callow from Barclays says they are buying $1.8 trillion worth of AAA or safe-haven bonds each year from an available pool of $2 trillion. Nothing like this has been seen before in modern times, if ever.
The Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, et al, own $10 trillion in bonds. China, the petro-powers, et al, own another $10 trillion. Between them they have locked up $20 trillion, equal to roughly 2...
To learn more, sign up for David's free newsletter and receive the free report from All About Trends - "How To Outperform 90% Of Wall Street With Just $500 A Week." Tell David PSW sent you. - Ilene...
In advance of today's FOMC meeting outcome and Chairman Bernanke's press conference, let's take a quick look at a couple of items in the latest Wall Street Journal survey of economists -- this one conducted June 7-11. With the recent controversy over the direction of Treasury yields, a key issue addressed in the survey is where economists expect the 10-year yield to be across six timeframes: mid-year and year end 2013 through 2015.
The survey was sent to 52 economists, 46 of whom responded, and of the 46, some skipped individual survey questions. Here is a table showing the major response statistics: Low, Median (middle), Average (aka Mean), Mode (most frequent) and High.
As we readily see from the table, the responses for ...
PDC Energy, Inc. ("PDC" or the "Company") (Nasdaq: PDCE) today announced that it closed yesterday, June 18, 2013, on the previously disclosed sale of its non-core Colorado natural gas assets.
The Company's non-core Colorado assets were sold to Caerus Oil and Gas LLC for approximately $185 million in net proceeds, subject to customary post-closing adjustments. Under the purchase and sale agreement, the transaction was given economic effect as of January 1, 2013. The assets sold are approximately 99% natural gas in terms of reserves and include an estimated 85 billion cubic feet equivalent (Bcfe) of net proved developed producing reserves as of December 31, 2012. The assets produced approximately 40 million net cubic feet of natural gas equivalent per day in the first quarter of...
LZB - La-Z-Boy, Inc. – Shares in furniture producer, La-Z-Boy, Inc., increased as much as 3.9% to $19.80 at the start of the session, the highest level since 2004, ahead of the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report after the closing bell today. Options volume is up ahead of the report, with roughly 400 contracts in play this afternoon versus average daily volume of around 80 contracts. Trading in La-Z-Boy call options is outpacing puts, with the call/put ratio up above 4.3 as of the time of this writing. Some traders appear to be p...
The market responded well today to good economic news and to the positive and somewhat surprising response to the election of a moderate Iranian President. Some moderation in Turkey didn’t hurt either, and overnight positive markets in Asia and Europe gave bullish investors enough encouragement to buy equities broadly.
This drove all three major domestic indices up about 1% before a late small selloff left the S&P 500 Index up nearly 1% and the Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average both up well over 0.5%. We think it likely this week that the market will challenge highs set in late May.
NEW: Writers are available to chat with Members regarding topics presented in SWW, comments are found below each post.
Click here for the latest Stock World Weekly. Sign in with your PSW user name and password, or sign up for a free trial. There's an interesting option trade on LULU presented in the newsletter this week.
Trivia on lululemon via Paul Price, article found in NYTimes.
Reminder: OpTrader is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
This post is for all our live virtual trade ideas and daily comments. Please click on "comments" below to follow our live discussion. All of our current trades are listed in the spreadsheet below, with entry price (1/2 in and All in), and exit prices (1/3 out, 2/3 out, and All out).
We also indicate our stop, which is most of the time the "5 day moving average". All trades, unless indicated, are front-month ATM options.
Please feel free to participate in the discussion and ask any questions you might have about this virtual portfolio, by clicking on the "comments" link right below.
To learn more about the swing trading virtual portfolio (strategy, performance, FAQ, etc.), please click here
Reminder: Craigzooka is available to chat with Members regarding his virtual portfolio performance, comments are found below each post.
By Craigzooka
I am going to share with you how I manage my IRA and the power of reducing your cost basis. My goal each year is a 20% return in my IRA. Sometimes I make it and sometimes I don't, but I believe that all of my success is due to reducing my cost basis. To illustrate the power of reducing your cost basis here are some trades we did last year. These trades are taken from an educational portfolio we ran in a paper-trading account for a little more than a year.
We bought RIG on 5/15/2012 for $44.13, sold it on 1/18/2013 for $46 but booked a profit of $1,154.
We bought MT on 1/4/2012 for $19.24, sold it on 12/21/2012 for $15 but booked a profit of $454.
We bought CHK on 1/27/2012 for $21.93, sold it on 10/19/2012 for $18 b...
Stock market posts another record setting week, but the big news came after Friday’s close.
Courtesy of NASA
The stock market put on another record setting show with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSEARCA:DIA) closing at a record high 15,118 and the S&P 500 (NYSEARCA:SPY) closing at 1633.70, another all time closing high.
For the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSEARCA:DIA) gained 1%, the S&P 500 (NYSEARCA:SPY) climbed 1.2%, the Nasdaq Composite (NYSEARCA:...
Reminder: Pharmboy is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
Well, well, well....it is good to know that there are others in the scientific arena who believed that YMI Bioscience's data (cough - Gilead) is a better drug than Incyte's Jakafi. Now, the definitive data are still unknown, but there was enough evidence from a Phase 2 trial to take a small risk for a huge reward. So, let's forget about Apple (AAPL), and do nothing but biotechs from now until Congress passes universal health care coverage for prescriptions....and drive the prices down so that research and development is no longer feasible to conduct in the US. Even Seattle Genetics (SGEN) has been on a tear as of late...
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City workers and union members won a victory against financial prudence in Los Angeles today.
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You motor out of the LAX airport – personally, I love the name "LAX" because it so beautifully describes the collective ethos of the place – and you discover quickly that the taxi cab’s windows are not that
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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
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