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Why Valuation Doesn’t Insure Against A Significant Market Decline

Comstock Partners — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:43:42 +0000

Given a clearly overbought market, the re-emergence of Europe's sovereign debt problem and the Fed reducing the imminence of QE3, even the bulls concede that a correction is likely. Overall, however, investors remain optimistic, and are looking forward to any correction as a buying opportunity, maintaining that the economy is too strong and the market too cheap to decline very much. As we have written about in recent comments, we do not think the economy is anywhere as strong as many believe. Moreover, we do not accept the conventional wisdom that the market, at current levels is undervalued, a point we want to make in this comment

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[Premium] More on my prediction of margin compression in the US and how Apple fits in

Edward Harrison — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:15:10 +0000

This weekly newsletter is a gold-level post and follows up on my prediction early last month about 2012 being a period of margin compression in US companies, threatening the rally in stocks and mandating a rotation in investment style or sector weighting

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Is Jens Weidmann Right About Bundesbank Target2 Risks?

Guest Author — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:00:21 +0000

That Weidmann now wishes to publicly claim he is concerned about risk associated with the Bundesbank's Target2 credit does not simply mean that this is a truth that has now been "acknowledged". I would guess that the sober Bundesbank officials that approved of the monthly bulletin piece on Target2 are fairly disgusted that Weidmann is adopting an approach in public that they know is ungrounded

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Use of lower-rated debt in repos has returned to pre-crisis levels

Guest Author — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:51:57 +0000

Looks like there’s a storm brewing in the U.S. repo markets. It figures: profit-center banks have every motivation to stay one step ahead of the regs and the pols. Since the gamekeepers have now gotten around to looking at proprietary trading and bringing derivatives onto exchanges, you can almost bet your first-born that the next crisis will be in neither one of these areas but someplace else entirely different

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[Premium]: 2012 an inflection point toward S&P500 margin compression

Edward Harrison — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:36:04 +0000

What I have been saying throughout 2011 is that margin compression is going to happen no matter what. The cuts have been made and so margins cannot grow any higher from cuts. It has to come from operating leverage that increases as a result of revenue growth

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The Fetish for Liquidity (and Reform of the Financial System)

Randall Wray — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:00:03 +0000

So here’s the deal. What happened is that the financial sector taken as a whole moved into extremely short-term finance of positions in assets. This is a huge topic and is related to the transformation of investment banking partnerships that had a long-term interest in the well-being of their clients to publicly-held, pump-and-dump enterprises whose only interest was the well-being of top management. It also is related to the rise of shadow banks that appeared to offer deposit-like liabilities but without the protection of FDIC. And it is related to the Greenspan “put” and the Bernanke “great moderation” that appeared to guarantee that all financial practices—no matter how crazily risky—would be backstopped by Uncle Sam. And it is related to very low overnight interest rate targets by the Fed (through to 2004) that made short-term finance extremely cheap relative to longer-term finance. All of this encouraged financial institutions to rely on insanely short short-term finance

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Guess what truth and “truthiness” in the TARP bailout reveal?

Guest Author — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:50:17 +0000

Every 60 days the Government Accountability Office issues a report on the various TARP programs. Each report looks at how the Office of Financial Stability, the body currently overseeing all TARP programs, is performing on a given metric. The latest report looks at the estimated lifetime costs to U.S. taxpayers of the programs still in operation, and also at how the Treasury communicates these costs to the public. As for this latter question the short answer is: very selectively, indeed

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What’s underneath the TARP?

Guest Author — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:30:00 +0000

The GAO says that issues with the TARP are not “material” and chooses instead to go with the less damning term of “significant”. A three-year record of getting it wrong would seem to suggest otherwise. We get that the $470 billion TARP was thrown together in a hurry. But to have "significant" issues with this extremely high-profile and unpopular corporate welfare program for three years running speaks of deliberate carelessness. Why on earth should we believe all the trumpeting about how profitable TARP has been when they can’t get the numbers right? In fact this all leaves me wondering: what’s really underneath that

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Bill Black on potential Bank of America derivatives losses

Edward Harrison — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:46:40 +0000

In the video below, Bill Black discusses the issues he raised in a recent post about Bank of America’s accounting activities. At issue is the effect of its shift of assets from the holding company to its FDIC-insured subsidiary. In total, Bank of America owns derivatives with a notional value of $75 trillion. The Federal Reserve authorised this accounting manoeuvre despite FDIC objections

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Bank of America’s Death Rattle: Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

William Black — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:45:51 +0000

Bob Ivry, Hugh Son and Christine Harper have written an article that needs to be read by everyone interested in the financial crisis. The article (available here) is entitled: BofA Said to Split Regulators Over Moving Merrill Derivatives to Bank Unit. The thrust of their story is that Bank of America’s holding company, BAC, has directed the transfer of a large number of troubled financial derivatives from its Merrill Lynch subsidiary to the federally insured bank Bank of America (BofA). The story reports that the Federal Reserve supported the transfer and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) opposed it. Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has written an appropriately blistering attack on this outrageous action, which puts the public at substantially increased risk of loss. I write to add some context, point out additional areas of inappropriate actions, and add a regulatory perspective gained from dealing with analogous efforts by holding companies to foist dangerous affiliate transactions on insured depositories. I’ll begin by adding some historical context to explain how B of A got into this maze of affiliate conflicts

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