Global Market Comments for October 28, 2008

1) All the recent trends reversed today on imminent Fed and ECB rate cuts. The Dow soared 900, crude and commodities popped, while the dollar and Treasuries sold off. The yen short I strongly recommended yesterday at ??92/$ fell back to ??97/$. The VIX fell back from 80% to only 66%. Please see last Friday's 'strategy call of the decade' warning of an imminent sharp recovery in stocks. Looks like we will be in an 8,000 to 10,000 range in the Dow for a while, which will define the bottom of this bear market.

2) I was looking at homes in Stockton over the weekend, the foreclosure capital of the world. I was offered an FHA loan at a 30 year fixed rate, 3% down, requiring a credit score of only 650. That works out to a monthly payment of $2,000/month on a 3,500 square foot home brand new out of the box. The bad news is that it is in Stockton.

3) A disastrous unwind of a pairs trade gone wrong has inadvertently caused Volkswagen's market cap to shoot up to $303 billion, making it the world's largest company. Figuring the company was overvalued, hedge funds shorted Volkswagen and went long Porsche. The trade accounted for 12% of VW's float. A surprise increase in margin requirements forced everyone to come out of this trade ad once, creating a gigantic short squeeze that drove VW's stock from ???200 to ???665 in just two days. This is a perfect example of what happens when too many big hedge funds bunch up in a single stock, and is why I never do pairs trades.

4) Consumer confidence for September produced a record fall from 61% to 38%. We knew it was going to be bad, but this is off the charts bad. It was the largest month on month drop to the lowest absolute level in history.

5) After being suspended for a week, the Icelandic kroner opened for trading today and promptly fell 50%. Watch for great vacation packages to this fascinating but newly impoverished Nordic country. Great for girl watching, sardines, spa treatments and puffin watching.

6) You know times are tough when Howdy Doody dies. E. Roger Muir, the star behind the NBC fifties children's' show we all grew up on, was 89. The last four decades had been kind of slow for him. Howdy Doody ran for president against Truman in 1948. Buffalo Bob mourns.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

'Control everything. Own nothing', John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Company.

Global Market Comments for October 24, 2008
STRATEGY CALL OF THE DECADE

We are building up to a textbook capitulation in global stock markets, and I believe that equities will hit multigenerational valuation lows sometime in the next ten days. The extremely rare limit down move in the S&P Index futures at the opening today, driving the VIX to another new record high of 89.5%, shows us that the end is near. More than 11,000 contracts, or $2.7 billion worth of stock equivalent, were for sale at market at the opening. Many people did not expect the stock market to open at all today, but in fact the Dow closed down only 316. Use the opportunity to load up on a portfolio of equities which you can put away for the rest of your life. There is no way to know when or where the final low will come, so put scale in bids at throw away levels well below the market. When the rally comes it will be vicious and you won't be able to buy stock. Focus on liquid, cash flow positive, best of breed names that will lead the charge upward like IBM (IBM), Intel (INTC), Cisco Systems (CSCO), General Electric (GE), Goldman Sachs (GS), Boeing (BA), Caterpillar (CAT), Microsoft (MSFT), US Steel (X), Exxon Mobile (XOM), and Walmart (WMT). You can also load up on long dated calls on the S&P 500 and NASDAQ.

1) American traders were stunned to find the world down 10% overnight. Hong Kong hit 12,600, down 60% from the year's high, and this is for an economy with a long term growth rate of 10% a year. Gold fell as low as $663, down from $1,050 in the spring. A massive unwind of the carry trade pushed the yen up 5% to ??92. Any buying of anything gets run over by a stampede of hedge fund selling, which has been ordered by lenders to cut positions and reduce leverage. The market is now fixated by two dates: October 31 when mutual funds close their books for the year, and November 15, the deadline for annual hedge fund redemption notifications. The last Monday in October is historically the most likely day to put in a low for the year.

2) PNC Financial (PNC) buys National City (NCC) with Treasury financing for $5.2 billion in stock, making it the 5^th largest bank in the country. The strong are eating the weak at fire sale prices. Expect more to come.

3) OPEC announced production cuts of 1.5 million barrels/day when 4 million was needed, driving prices down $4 to $63. This guarantees a glut early next year which may drive prices down to $50. Then they will cut production by 4 million?? barrels. Expect local gasoline price to drop below $2 before this sell off is over. US motorists drove 15 billion fewer miles than a year ago, a record drop, saving 12 million barrels of crude (24 super tankers full) for that month alone. Can you believe that crude has fallen by $85 since July?

4) LIBOR has dropped 10 consecutive days. The commercial paper market reopens next week. The medicine is on the way as long as the patient doesn't die first. The futures market is pricing in a likelihood of a 75 basis point cut in rates in November. The ECB may cut rates as early as Monday.

Global Market Comments for October 23, 2008

1) The blame game for the financial crisis on capitol hill continued in earnest, with everyone from the SEC's Christopher Cox, to former Fed governor Allan Greenspan pointing fingers. Greenspan was 'shocked' that his own 40 year old models blew up. Sounds like one of Claude Rains? lines from the movie 'Casablanca'. In the meantime the real economy plunges into the abyss, with weekly jobless figures leaping 15,000 to 478,000. Brokerage houses are making sure their upper floor windows are locked, and brokers are no longer allowed to wear laces with their shoes.

2) Alternative energy plans are now under the twin threats of lower crude prices and a lock up in the credit markets, according to Roy Kuga, vice president of PG&E.?? Of the $65 billion in US power generation capital investment for this year, $30 billion is slated to go into alternative sources. But the cost of alternative construction has doubled in four years. Most wind turbine manufacturers have backlogs stretching out to 2010. California now sees 11% of its power generated from alternative sources, with geothermal accounting for half of that. The goal is to take the total up to 20% by the of end 2010 and 33% by 2020. The main impediment is getting permits to build facilities on Federal land, which are always opposed locally. The Feds own 42% of the land in California. This explains why California has gone from the world leader in wind technology in the early eighties, to just an also ran today.

3) After suffering through the bust of the Great Japanese Housing Bubble and the Lost Decade, the surviving Japanese banks became the world?s most conservatively run financial institutions. They entered this crisis with very modest leverage ratios of 10:1, no sub prime debts, and $600 billion in cash reserves. This wad is now being put to work on a spending spree in the US, with Mitsubishi UFJ Bank's $9 billion investment for 20% of Morgan Stanley only the latest example. Japanese banks have made a total of $57 billion in foreign acquisitions so far this year.

4) What is the worst managed surviving company in the US? Yahoo (YHOO) turned down a $44 billion bid from Microsoft in February for the sole purpose of preserving existing management. It is now worth only $12 billion. Raider Carl Icahn alone has lost $700 million on this play. Is management so good that it is worth a $32 billion premium? Shareholders don?t think so. YHOO just announced a lay off of 1,400, and the best people are leaving in droves for their own start ups. In the meantime, Microsoft is using their unspent cash mountain to buy back their own stock. Expect the lawsuits to fly.

It turns out that after all long, short, and rehedged positions were netted out, the Lehman credit default swaps only cost the financial community $5.5 billion, vs. an initial headline number of $400 billion. This shows you how misleading the headline numbers for derivatives can be. The true problem is only a fraction of the feared amount, and this is being reflected in prices. The $63 trillion number you often hear about as the size of all outstanding derivatives, is a phantom.

Global Market Comments for October 22, 2008

1) Today global deflation trumped the continuing decline in LIBOR, knocking the Dow down 700 at one point. There was a five cent move in the euro today down to $1.27 as global funds poured into Treasuries. It turns out that a global recession is great for the dollar because it dramatically shrinks the trade and current account surplus. The drop in crude alone since July has cut our payments abroad from $700 billion to $400 billion/year, and that swing immediately hits the foreign currency market. The Euro is now gunning for the $1.22 level, where it will have given up exactly half of its appreciation from 2001-2008. All this in only four months! In an extreme, overshooting move we could see parity against the dollar of $1:???1, and we live in an age of extremes. The next big down leg in the long term dollar bear megatrend will start next year at first hint of a recovery in the US economy. Then we could go to $2.00/euro.

2) Global lending capacity is shrinking at a tremendous rate. Banks are deleveraging as quickly as they can, while others are going under. Healthy banks are using the Federal bail out money not to lend, but to deleverage, as they normally would at this point in the economic cycle. Big money center banks are going to take over weak regional banks and use the new deposit bases to deleverage further, leaving the government to pick up the tab in the form of loss carry forwards from write downs on newly acquired bad loan and securities portfolios. The number of banks in the US is about to take a quantum leap down. The global asset base is going to have to shrink to meet the new smaller loan capacity. Although virtually all commodities and emerging stock and bond markets have halved in the past three months, and industrialized stock markets have been cut in half in the past year, the loan capacity to asset gap is still probably in the $5-$10 trillion range. Where is most of the remaining fat? In real estate, which still has further to fall.

3) Asian markets got slammed last night as fears of a hard landing in China accelerate. Stock indexes were down 3-7%. China could slow from a 12% to a 5% growth rate as their foreign markets dry up. If growth falls under 5% you will have another revolution in the Middle Kingdom. Copper, an important leading economic indicator, crashed 9% today down to $1.83. The Baltic Dry Index ($BDI) hit a new low of 1,292, down 89% from its 12,000 high.

4) Dr. Allen Sinai of Decision Economics says that 20 of the world's top 47 economies accounting for 75% of world GDP are now at or in recession. This is the most coordinated, simultaneous global postwar recession in history, and it will be the longest, stretching well into 2010.