BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

What we are witnessing in real-time is Lehman 2.0. Unfortunately, stock gamblers are always the last to know...

The right shoulder has now been amply confirmed as being the locus of global collapse. The dominoes are falling. A week ago, few people had ever heard of Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and Signature Bank - aka. the "Si" banks. Now they're all collapsed. The second (SVB) and third (Signature) largest bank failures in U.S. history in less than one week.

Recall that March 2021 was the peak for the pandemic IPO junk bubble. Two years later, the Silicon Valley bank collapsed.  Coincidence? No. Then, March 2022 was the first leg down of the Crypto collapse. One year later TWO Crypto banks collapsed. Coincidence? No. The Crypto "DeFi" movement has totally imploded and now it's imploding the traditional banking system. 

Who knows what will be the next domino to fall, no one saw these ones coming. 

Or did they?

Notwithstanding Fed members jettisoning stock in junk banks days ahead of collapse, most pundits are calling these bank failures a Black Swan event, meaning none of them saw it coming. And yet this bank collapse was totally predictable in the context of central banks tightening into an incipient credit crisis - which itself was the direct result of the super stimulus global central banks used during the pandemic. 

Central banks caused this crisis from over-easing to over-tightening.  

 

Today, was CPI day and while it's slowly coming down, it's still at 6%. The Fed is now boxed in between banks failing and a CPI that will sky-rocket if they stop hiking rates. In other words, the Minsky Moment has already started and it's unstoppable. 

Here we see the Fed took their foot off the gas in 2007 due to the housing bubble, and the CPI sky-rocketed from 1.5% to 5.5%. Of course, the same thing happened to Volcker back in 1980 when he prematurely stopped tightening. He was very quickly forced to restart tightening when the economy was in recession.

Imagine if the CPI rebounded back to 9%. That's the bull case right now. A cessation of tightening followed by a shock restart later this year. 

In summary, we are one week away from the Fed making an even bigger monetary policy error. And no surprise the market is rallying due to their first bailout.

The BTFP rally. What else?

THE MINSKY MOMENT

Latest update: March 12th, 10:00pm EDT

The Minsky Financial Instability Hypothesis:

"If an economy with a sizeable body of speculative financial units is in an inflationary state, and the authorities attempt to exorcise inflation by monetary constraint, then speculative units will become Ponzi units and the net worth of previously Ponzi units will quickly evaporate. Consequently, units with cash flow shortfalls will be forced to try to make position by selling out position. This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values"

FDIC Q42022 Banking Profile:

What follows is a summary of the current crisis and my best guess as to what happens next.

This past week, the FDIC warned THIS exact scenario could happen as a result of the fact that U.S. banks are sitting on RECORD unrealized losses:

"On Monday, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)—the agency that backstops depositors—addressed risks U.S. lenders faced three years after the outbreak of the pandemic. Chief among them was the potential for a bank run."

Gruenberg warned these unrealized losses “weaken a bank’s ability to meet unexpected liquidity needs,” and cautioned that mapping out a strategy to fund themselves profitably would prove a “complex and challenging task”.

Indeed.

See chart above of unrealized losses. Among the various causes of this crisis, chief among the immediate risks is that these banks are sitting on gargantuan unrealized losses while still passing regular FDIC-conducted audits. In other words, the FDIC itself is to blame for this fiasco. Clearly the magnitude of potential losses dwarfs any prior period INCLUDING 2008. 

All that was required to bring down Silicon Valley Bank was a small deposit flight which was taking place anyways as their base of bankrupt Tech firms was steadily going out of business. That left them forced to raise capital and sell bonds at a loss, thus revealing the chasmic hole in their balance sheet which had been there all along. It's the exact same thing that happened to Bernie Madoff in November 2008, he ran out of cash to pay redemptions. 

Which gets us to what happens next?

Clearly the lessons of 2008 have long since been forgotten. Back then companies having deposits larger than the FDIC limit were forced to move these large deposits to multiple different banks in order to maintain FDIC insurance which at the time was $100k limit. Now, it's a $250k limit. 

Therefore, any responsible and albeit amnesiac CFO this coming week will be scrambling to move their millions out of individual banks and diversifying their bank accounts. Compounding this crisis is the fact that average rates on money market funds are ~4% higher than bank deposit rates. Yes, you read that right. So moving money out of banks to broker accounts is a no-brainer from a Treasury standpoint. Personally, I recommend t-bill accounts over money market funds. DO NOT assume as Ackman says below that there is any such thing as a "Systematically Important Bank" that could prevent its own depositors with deposits > $250k from taking massive haircuts. That's asinine. 

Bill Ackman summarizes what I just said:

In other words, within the next 48 hours, the government must raise the FDIC insured deposit limit from $250k to infinity. Something that would require an act of Congress.

While that's not happening, the cries for bailout will get louder by the minute.

"Voices from tech and finance are increasingly calling for the federal government to push another bank to take over the failed Silicon Valley Bank to protect uninsured deposits. Their main concern is that a failure to protect deposits over $250,000 could cause a loss of faith in other mid-sized banks"

"Observers are calling out the irony as some VCs with notoriously libertarian free-market attitudes are are now calling for a bailout"

[Update: Sunday March 12th, 10:10pm]

Ok, so we now know they got their bailout which comes in the form of an asset exchange program. Banks can use their "illiquid" aka. underwater assets for a short-term loan from the Fed. This way they can ensure ample liquidity in the event of a bank run without having to sell down their assets and otherwise expose their true capital deficit. 

However, the Fed just promised to make ALL depositors at SVB/Signature whole even beyond the $250k FDIC insurance limit. To do this, they will tap the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund which has ~1% of assets relative to the U.S. deposit base. Yes, you read that right. Which means sure they will bailout everyone this time, but can they bailout every regional bank and ALL of their depositors? Of course not. Ex-Congress, the FDIC just unilaterally raised the $250k limit for those depositors who are part of the very first banking dominoes to fall. I have no doubt that's not actually legal. Basically throwing everyone else under the bus to bailout companies with millions of deposits.  

"The DIF currently has over $100 billion in it, a sum the Treasury official said was “more than fully sufficient” to cover SVB and Signature depositors"

CFOs, get busy...

FOMC: Fear Of Missing Crash

We are witnessing the largest monetary/economic policy disaster in world history taking place in real-time. And not one media pundit is bright enough to question it...

Go back three years to the start of the pandemic. Global central banks panicked in unison and expanded monetary policy the most in history. However, what they DIDN'T do is lower interest rates. Only the Fed lowered interest rates a mere 1.5%. The ECB was already at 0%. Japan 0%. BOE 0% etc. So instead they used their balance sheets to inflate asset markets in order to create the virtual simulation of prosperity using Quantitative Easing. 

Sadly, in the meantime, the middle class got trapped in the asset bubble. They bought Bitcoins, junk IPOs, over-priced cars, and of course over-priced homes. Everything is over-valued. And of course they borrowed record amounts of money to buy record amounts of over-valued assets.

Now, on the other side of the pandemic, these central banks are keeping their balance sheets and asset prices near all time highs while raising the cost of borrowing far beyond what it was pre-pandemic. 

Anyone can clearly see that inflation is 100% correlated to the balance sheet and has nothing to do with interest rates. Interest rates are now a staggering 3x higher than they were in the months prior to the pandemic. 

What's all the more shocking is that there isn't one media pundit or "expert" who is questioning this strategy. They are all largely onboard with the idea of ever-larger interest rate hikes. 

The middle class is now trapped by this moronic policy error. Soon their asset values will collapse and they will be underwater on every liability while job losses sky-rocket. The net effect of this colossal policy error will of course be global mass deleveraging and a middle class that is dead on arrival. The Fed won't be able to use their magic powers to bring them back from mass bankruptcy. Global central banks will be caught in a global liquidity trap. Meaning interest rates will collapse but no one will be able to borrow. Under those conditions, no bank will be deemed "too big to fail" this time around. 

Not only will corporate profits collapse, but real yields will sky-rocket, the combination of which will leave stocks bidless.

Which gets us back to the Casino. 

With today's Senate testimony, Powell just put large-scale rate hikes back on the table. Recall that the entire global RISK ON rally since October was premised upon the idea that the Fed would soon be done raising rates. They "stepped down" from .75% in November, to .5% in December and .25% in January. The theory was no more rate hikes by summer. 

As of today, Fed futures now see a .70% probability of a .5% rate hike two weeks from now. 

In other words, the entire premise for this four month global rally was 100% false. Which means that investors are incorrectly positioned for what comes next. We've seen this movie three times - 2015, 2018, and now. However, we've never seen it wherein the Fed accelerates rate hikes after global markets implode. 

Soon, Powell will be juggling ten pies while falling down stairs as everyone realizes too late that this was a colossal policy error with no way out. 

His credibility will be destroyed along with the Fed and all of the other global central banks. And then people will finally realize they can't trust the Wall Street captured financial media either. 

Something the sheeple should have figured out the last time THIS happened:

In summary, this entire global rally since October was a MASSIVE bull trap predicated upon a 100% false narrative.

And most people are not getting out intact.

The exits are already closing:

SYSTEM TEST 3.0

What all bulls need to learn the hard way is that in Ponzi markets there is no strength in numbers...

A head and shoulders top is now clearly visible in Semiconductor stocks, Internet stocks, and the World ex-U.S.

As we see via semiconductors below, the left shoulder which took place in Q1 2021 marked the Gamestop pump and dump and the top for Emerging Markets, IPOs, SPACs and Ark ETFs. During that selloff the hedge fund Archegos exploded.

The head took place in late Q4 2021 and marked the top for all of the major U.S. averages. That was the beginning of the global bear market. As we see below, the first leg back down to the neckline saw the largest breadth collapse in Nasdaq history (bottom pane). And the bear market low saw the FTX explosion.  

Which brings us to the right shoulder. What I call "System Test 3.0".

The high yield spread which is a proxy for risk appetite is highly compressed as it was pre-pandemic crash.

The left shoulder for internets goes back to March 2020.  

The left shoulder for the World ex-U.S. is the same as it is for the Internets above. March 2020.

My Geometric index equal weights the largest cap Tech stocks in the market. On the left shoulder these stocks were consistently above the 200 dma. On the right shoulder, they are consistently below the 200 dma. They have become consistently more overbought on Momentum (MACD) all the way down.  

These are basic facts that bulls are ignoring. 

The Adani crisis started on the right shoulder and is only the very beginning of meltdown for Indian markets. 

Bitcoin became extreme overbought on the left shoulder, now it's imploding again on the right shoulder.

Bulls never gave an explanation as to why markets rallied into the pandemic lockdown. 

This time, they will have even less explanation as to why markets rallied into a global depression.

In summary, only someone with zero commonsense could trust these markets. Hence, they are largely unquestioned.

In Wall Street We Trust

The bullish thesis is that all younger people will get wiped out due to their misallocation of capital, to the sole benefit of older generations doubling down on their Ponzi investments. In other words, no generation in U.S. history has been fooled as often as this one...

 

It took ~15 years but over time retail investors have totally forgotten the pain of 2008. After the 1930s, the generations that endured that pain NEVER forgot, even decades later.

Today's financial media is wholly derelict in their duties, as they have been for decades amid an ever-growing debt bubble heading for inevitable disaster. The individual investor has now been throw to the wolves of Wall Street. What was Occupy Wall Street a decade ago is now trust the fairy tale of the never-ending financial/economic cycle - the belief that the pandemic bear market lasting one month corrected the longest bull market in history.

Below is what the ratio of bull market to bear market would look like if that were actually true. The 2009-2020 bull market would be ~130x longer in months than the bear market that followed:

Gen-Z is now totally under the bus. Two years ago the Gamestop pump and dump frenzy brought record newbies into the market where they were unceremoniously obliterated. 

The media called it "The democratization of markets". They even made a Netflix documentary about it called "Eat the Rich". It turns out the rich were not the ones who got eaten. It was a totally false narrative and yet largely unquestioned.  

Millennial investors are in the 30-45 age range and they are  now trapped in the housing market. They didn't believe all of the stories that emanated from 2008 about the risk of housing bubbles, so they went ahead and made the same mistake a mere 10 years later. 

So far, global housing prices - with some regional exceptions - are holding up, but sales volumes have collapsed. A precursor to major price decline. 

Soon the combined impact of $2 trillion student loan debt, epic housing collapse, stock market wipeout and mass layoffs will land on them like a ton of bricks. 

The good news is that younger people who get wiped out by this global Ponzi collapse can recover from this debacle and eventually get themselves back on track financially. Time is on their side. The older generations who SHOULD know better than to trust Ponzi markets, don't have that kind of time.

So far retirement gamblers are doing the exact same thing GEN-Z dunces did - they are "HODLING" meaning holding on with the belief that markets will come back. They look around and see other generations making the exact same mistakes they made in Y2K and 2008 and just assume they alone will be spared the consequences of the pandemic bubble. 

Which is where it gets interesting: 

As things go on the domestic side of markets - a case of survivor bias, so it is on the global markets. A massive case of survivor bias. There is this recurring false belief that U.S. markets are a safe haven from global dislocation.

Global central bank tightening has been collapsing Emerging Markets since 2021 while capital retreats to the safety of the U.S. The belief is that they will continue to implode to the benefit of the U.S. We saw this same cycle play out between 2018 and 2020. And it all imploded in this EXACT same timeframe.

It's the "It can't happen to me" trade on a global scale:

Ironically, just as the financial media were lying to newbie investors two years ago during the Gamestop debacle, so too are they lying to older investors right now. 

Why? Because in the end media bulls and Wall Street analysts will be spared the consequences of their specious advice.

But, at some point it's not the liar who is the problem, it's the person willing to believe the liar who is the real problem.

Who benefited from this pandemic?

"GREAT NEWS, NO LANDING"

The end of cycle fool's rally is ending, as it appears the last fool was finally found. Since the start of the year bullish pundits have been rounding up useful idiots to feed into the Dow Jones hopper, however the almighty Dow Jones Illusional Average has now given up six weeks of gains in three days. Amid record retail investor inflows...

Over the course of the past year, the bullish thesis has shape shifted from hyperinflation to inflation, stagflation, soft landing, and now no landing, meaning no inflation AND no recession, the delusion du jour. You have to be brain dead to believe it, hence it's now Wall Street consensus:

The "No landing" fantasy was fabricated in order to allay investor concerns that an ever-more hawkish Fed will implode the economy, as they have every other time in history. So, the *new* fairy tale is that Fed over-tightening can bring down inflation while the economy continues to grow robustly. It's abundantly clear by this level of end of cycle denial that the latest uptick in social mood has completely fried the brains of today's financial punditry. 

Nevertheless, one must ask the critical question, why is Fed tightening causing the economy to reaccelerate at the end of the cycle? The main reason is because investors are front-running the Fed, causing financial conditions to ease. Consider that financial conditions have now gone nowhere for the past year, despite the fact that the Fed has raised rates MORE than they did back in 2007. However, the problem is that wages are lagging inflation, meaning "real" (inflation-adjusted) wages are negative.  Therefore, consumers are increasing their debt load in order to keep up with inflation. This is manifesting in sky-rocketing credit card balances AND delinquencies. So sure, this is an "inflationary" moment, however it is far from sustainable. The inflation mentality has led consumers to increase debt, on the belief that they can grow their incomes at a pace that will offset the rising debt burden. But that's not what is happening.

Financial markets are ignoring what's happening in the underlying economy: 

Ironically, this same sequence of events played out in 2008: An end of cycle rally attended by an uptick in consumer sentiment, and a Fed totally concerned with inflation. A massive policy error, and then an unforeseen collapse. 

"On the morning after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in 2008, most Federal Reserve officials still believed that the American economy would keep growing despite the metastasizing financial crisis"

The transcript for that meeting contains 129 mentions of “inflation” and five of “recession.”

What does all of this have to do with casino gambling? Pretty much nothing, since money has to go somewhere hence there will always be a bullish investment hypothesis on offer, no matter how moronic. Investment managers do not get paid to sit in cash.

Another popular investment hypothesis championed by Tom Lee of Fundstrat is that fundamentals no longer matter, all that matters is the flow of funds. There is only one problem with that theory - it's not working. Not for lack of trying mind you: 

"Individual investors have been snapping up stocks at the fastest pace on record as U.S. equity markets have charged higher to start the year. Over the past month, retail investors funneled an average of $1.51 billion each day into U.S. stocks, the highest amount ever recorded"

It turns out that if you pay a trillion dollars for a brick, its valuation doesn't increase, unless you find someone else who is even dumber. Generally speaking, these are not the types of people who are sitting on piles of cash. 

As of Tuesday's close, the Dow has given up all gains for the year. 

Meanwhile, this decline is still tracking the Feb/March 2020 crash week by week. The difference being, that one was attended by global bailout whereas this one is attended by global tightening. 

Which means that investors will get to experience the excitement of real investing without a Fed safety net. Which will test the predominant hypothesis that printed money is the secret to effortless wealth.

PANDEMONIUM 2.0

Central banks bailed them out of pandemic, so they went ALL IN at the end of the cycle. THE END.

I've been recalcitrant in my blogging lately. Bullish malaise has apparently comatized even the most bearish of bloggers. Something about collapsed volume and volatility will do that. However, next week is the anniversary of the pandemic crash three years ago AND the start of the war in Ukraine one year ago. So, it would be highly ironic if all of this widely ignored risk all exploded in the same timeframe. They didn't see it last time, and clearly they are clueless this time around as well. Three years ago next week, at the start of the crash, the weekend Barron's lead story claimed "It's STILL A Bull Market Everywhere You Look". It was already too late to get out. 

Feb. 21st, 2020:

Since the Fed hiked rates by 1/4 point at their meeting two weeks ago, the economic data has all run on the side of hot. And yet gamblers have been totally unperturbed by rising rate risk. To paraphrase Zerohedge: rising rates means rising recession risk, rising crash risk, and therefore rising chance of rate cuts. To get the rate cuts, you have to first get the rate hikes, the recession, and the crash. Meaning the bullish hypothesis is the same as the bearish hypothesis. Crack dosage being the only difference. 

I would remind everyone at this juncture that it wasn't emergency rate cuts in March 2020 that saved markets and it wasn't the restart of QE - those were both limit DOWN events. What saved markets is when the Fed panicked and took over the Treasury bond market. Something that is so far off the radar right now, there is not the slightest inkling that it will happen. Whereas back in 2020, the Fed was already in rate cutting mode and QE mode, due to the Repo crisis.

In other words, the exorbitant Fed bailout that took place three years ago is the reason why inflation is running too hot today, and it's also the entire premise of the bullish hypothesis. We all agree a bailout is inevitable, but from what level? 

Not this one. 

This week's CPI ran hot, but that also didn't faze markets. Year over year, CPI dropped from 6.5% to 6.4%. That's after 18 1/4 point rate hikes in one year - more than took place in the three years leading up to the 2008 GFC. As we see below, back in 2007 when the Fed pivoted, the CPI shot up 4%. If that were to happen now, the CPI would blow through 10%. 

Which means the Fed can't pivot until there's a crash. Which fortunately is the bullish hypothesis anyways. 

Everything the Fed is doing right now is making T-bonds more attractive relative to stocks. They're actively raising rates which compresses the forward P/E multiple, they're slowing GDP growth and profit growth, and yet stocks remain record overvalued relative to bonds. Why? Because the inflation premium is still in the market. We are a binary event away from repricing that assumption out of the market, at which point it will be the end of the cycle and stocks will be bidless.

All because investors believed that THIS Fed could keep interest rates, demand, profits, equity multiples, stocks, housing prices all at record highs. 

While  bringing inflation down. 

For the first time in World history.

Chart gallery:

Today's technicians are TOTALLY clueless. This right shoulder is a mess compared to the left shoulder.  

Aussie disconnect deja vu of Feb 2020:

Dax deja vu

In summary, the most bullish thing I can say is that as of this moment, it's still a bull market everywhere you look.