China Deleveraging Hits Corporate Bonds As Cascade Effect Begins

Following the market lockdown during October’s Party Congress, many commentators were disturbed by the continued rise in Chinese government bond yields as we returned to “business as usual”, with the 10-year rising to 4%. At the beginning of this month, we discussed the sell-off (see “China: Shadow Bank Inflows Are Critical To Sustain The Ponzi…But They’re Falling”) and noted a useful insight from the Wall Street Journal.

An important anomaly to note about the bond rout: as government bonds sold off, yields on less-liquid, unsecured Chinese corporate bonds barely moved.

 

That is atypical in an environment of rising rates - usually, bond investors shed their less-liquid holdings and hold on to assets that are more easily tradable, like government debt.

The question was…why had corporate bond yields barely moved? The answer, according to the WSJ, was that China’s deleveraging policy led to redemptions in the shadow banking sector, e.g. in the notorious $4 trillion Wealth Management Products (WMP) sector. Faced with redemptions, shadow banks had to sell something…quickly…and highly liquid government bonds were the “easiest option”. Furthermore…and this is potentially significant…the WSJ noted.

Meanwhile, the nonbanks have held on to their higher-yielding corporate bonds, which at least have the benefit of helping them to maintain high returns.

Not any more (see below).

We agreed with the WSJ’s explanation at the time, but noted that the government bond sell-off was actually a sign of the unravelling of the WMP Ponzi scheme. The Chinese authorities are wise to the Ponzi which is why they announced the overhaul of shadow banking and WMPs last Friday (see “A ‘New Era’ In Chinese Regulation Means Turmoil For $15 Trillion In China"s ‘Shadows"). However, the new regulations don’t kick in until mid-2019, a sign to us that when they looked “under the bonnet”, they didn’t like what they saw.  

We doubt that China can achieve an orderly restructuring of its shadow banking sector, never mind its much larger credit bubble. A sign that we have taken another step towards China’s “Minsky moment” is that the bond sell-off has spread to the corporate bond market. The chart shows how spreads versus sovereign bonds have blown out during the last few weeks.

Bloomberg noted how the 10-year yield on China Development Bank notes, a quasi-sovereign issue, closed above 5% for the first time since 2014 today while, in another report, it put the corporate bond sell-off in a wider context.

China’s deleveraging campaign is finally starting to bite in the nation’s corporate-bond market, a shift that will make 2018 a clearer test of policy makers’ appetites to let struggling companies fail. Yields on five-year top-rated local corporate notes have jumped about 33 basis points since the month began, to a three-year high of 5.3 percent, according to data compiled by clearing house ChinaBond. Government bonds, which have far greater liquidity, had already moved last month as the central bank warned further deleveraging was needed.

With more than $1 trillion of local bonds maturing in 2018-19, it will become increasingly expensive for Chinese companies to roll over financing -- and all the tougher for those in industries like coal that the nation’s leadership wants to shrink. Two companies based in Inner Mongolia, a northern province that’s suffered from a debt-and-construction binge, missed bond payments on Tuesday, in a demonstration of the kind of pain that may come.

Bloomberg tries to put a positive spin on the corporate bond sell-off, defaults are healthy in terms of differentiating good and credits.

In the long haul, that all may be good for China. Allowing more defaults could see its bond market become more like its overseas counterparts, with a greater differentiation in price. And that could mean it channels funds more productively. “The deleveraging campaign and the new rules on the asset management industry will further differentiate good and bad quality credits, and make the onshore credit market more efficient,” said Raymond Gui, senior portfolio manager at Income Partners Asset Management (HK) Ltd. “Weaker companies will find it harder to roll over their debts because funding costs will stay high.” Gui predicts yields will keep climbing. The average for top-rated corporate bonds is already 2.2 percentage points above what investors demanded to hold them in October last year.

The rise comes as authorities show greater determination to shift the economy onto a more sustainable footing, with less debt. The latest move was a plan to discipline the asset-management industry, including banning guaranteed rates of return. People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan graphically depicted the risk of excess leverage, by evoking a "Minsky moment," or sudden collapse of asset values. Key to that endeavor will be scaling back some of the implicit credit guarantees that have backed a broad swathe of Chinese borrowers. The country only started allowing corporate defaults in 2014. Last year there was a record, coming in at at least 29. It’s unclear yet whether that total will be met in 2017.

Bloomberg spoke to an analyst who also believes the recent sell-off in Chinese bonds is more to do with separating the “wheat from the chaff”, rather than anything more profound.

"We expect the divergence of performance between different bond categories (Chinese government bonds, policy bank bonds and credits) to become more prominent into 2018," Albert Leung and Prashant Pande, rates strategists at Nomura Holdings Inc., wrote in a note Wednesday.

We disagree. From our perspective, it looks like early signs of cascading sell-offs within Chinese financial markets, which have long been abused by excessive leverage and Ponzi characteristics. Talking of which, the Shanghai Composite Index suffered its biggest one-day drop since June 2016.

What caused the sell-off? According to some commentators it was fear that the local bond rout was getting out of control...hence "cascade". We noted last week that traders had been stunned by the official warning from Beijing that some stocks - in this case Kweichow Moutai - had risen "too far, too fast". Zhengyang Shen, a Shanghai-based analyst at Northeast Securites commented.

"The decline in Moutai has triggered selloffs in some of this year"s best performing stocks."

Which sounds an awful lot like another example of cascading selling...

"None Of The Problems Are Solved" Despite Global "Plunge Protection" Overnight

When many American traders went to bed last night, China was tumbling, the euro was in trouble, and US equity futures were notching lower. Then, as former fund manager Richard Breslow scoffs, it appears the world "reconsidered" and everything rallied to erase any sign of discontent or uncertainty by the time everyone woke up...

Via Bloomberg,

Apparently, the word of the day is “reconsider.”

Across a whole host of assets, we got somewhat violent moves early in the 24-hour trading cycle that managed to unwind themselves over the course of the day.

I kept being told that the euro, Chinese equities, U.S. equity futures, gold, bond yields, Eurostoxx 50, and so on, all reversed their opening, sometimes gap, moves after the market reconsidered what it all meant.

Of course, that’s being a bit too kind. It would be more accurate to say things turned around when traders actually considered things for the first time. But this all matters more than just a collection of knee-jerk reactions that have come to naught as another trading region came in.

 

North America isn’t being asked to break the tie and decide who was right. They are being told that they can afford to ignore the news that propelled things in the first place. After all, we’re right back where we started. No harm, no foul. That would be a mistake, as once again we keep muddling-up short-term and long-term information as if they should be discounted by the same rate and assuming we should trade without benefit of context.

 

 

Chinese equities opened lower leaving gaps from last Friday’s close.

 

 

Big swings: the Shenzhen dropped a quick 2.1% before staging a relentless rally throughout the day to finish up by 0.9%. No leap on the close, just a steady rally.

 

 

The commentary at the lows was as dire as the dismissive tone was at the close.

 

The PBOC proposed additional regulations to curb the run-away shadow banking industry. What was described in the morning as policies that would cause a flood of outflows from various short-term investments were later described as likely to attract foreign inflows. Wait, we’re not collapsing through the last lines of support any more? What a gift -- buy!

 

The message from this is that, once again, the PBOC is delivering on what they have warned about and promised to address. Perhaps instead of trying to deconstruct the “real” Chinese intentions based on outmoded epigrams, we should start to listen to what they’re actually saying. And accept that regulation isn’t bad by definition. Sometimes a healthier Main Street can actually be good for equities--the old-fashioned way. But it would be folly to decide these new regulations must not be all important because of the day’s price action.

 

European shares and the euro were hit early on the German coalition talks collapse.

 

 

What began as “markets are being roiled” quickly turned to markets “shrugged it off.” Hardly. They recovered on the very fortuitously timed announcement that Volkswagen was going to spend an additional EU25B over the next five years on its core brand. That’s hard and good news. May even help out with Germany’s hopelessly flat Phillips curve.

 

 

But don’t think, Chancellor Merkel on her back foot isn’t something with negative possibilities that make it foolish to dismiss. Just hard to enumerate the immediate implications.

As Breslow concludes, the mirage of markets" ignorance does not mean anything is solved.

Some of the other realities to keep factoring into your analysis and avoid being lulled into ignoring include:

• Brexit wasn’t solved because today’s headline was upbeat, it’s serial noise;


• you’ve no way of handicapping Nafta as each debating point is aired;


• no one has a firm handle on the Middle-East;


• and U.S. tax reform may end up just stoking the debate of whether a bad deal is better than no deal.

Don’t ever let someone tell you the really big news is the ones you can afford to ignore

And it appears we"re gonna need more "help"...

China: Shadow Bank Inflows Are Critical To Sustain The Ponzi... But They"re Falling

During the Party Congress, even China’s somewhat watered down versus of the free markets was suspended so as not to disturb the glorification of Xi Jinping as the nation’s greatest leader since Mao. Returning to “business as usual”, some commentators have been disturbed by the continued rise in government bond yields with the 10-year hitting 3.93% earlier this week.

Bloomberg described it this morning as a “tumultuous few days”.

We also noted Huachuang Securities Co. comment that bond holders may be about to get hit by “daggers falling from the sky,” if the Party adopts more aggressive deleveraging policies. In a far less sensationalist way, the Wall Street Journal has attempted a post-mortem on the recent sell-off in the Chinese government bond market.

Catching sight of a chain reaction in China’s markets is rare.

 

Carrying out a postmortem of a recent selloff in China’s $9 trillion bond market shows how it is becoming harder for Beijing to untangle its increasingly intertwined financial system. In the aftermath of China’s twice-a-decade party congress last week, yields on benchmark 10-year Chinese government bonds spiked to 3.9%, their highest in three years. Government bond futures fell.

 

Reasons proffered for the sudden rout ranged from expectations of higher U.S. interest rates to general fearmongering.

Having acknowledged the growing complexity of China’s financial system, WSJ provides a valuable insight, noting the relative stability of corporate bond yields during the recent sell-off in the government sector...

An important anomaly to note about the bond rout: as government bonds sold off, yields on less-liquid, unsecured Chinese corporate bonds barely moved.

 

That is atypical in an environment of rising rates - usually, bond investors shed their less-liquid holdings and hold on to assets that are more easily tradable, like government debt.

Using this handy (kind of) diagram of flows in China’s financial system...

...WSJ tries to explain “how the selloff in China really worked”.

In essence what happened is that, as funding costs for Chinese banks have risen, they have been forced to compensate by placing more money in the shadow banking sector, with all the risks that entails (i.e. leverage and risky assets). Here’s the Journal’s version.

Let’s start with the travails of China’s small and midsize lenders that—like most banks—fund themselves by taking in customer deposits and by borrowing in wholesale markets.

 

In China, the latter has increasingly meant issuing short-term bonds known as NCDs, or negotiable certificates of deposit. The trouble for Chinese banks of late is that both these funding sources have become expensive: Borrowing costs have risen as Beijing pursues its deleveraging campaign, while bank-deposit growth has also been slowing.

 

To balance out these rising costs, banks have been placing more of their money with so-called nonbank financial institutions—the likes of trust companies, funds and securities companies—that offer high returns from investing in various markets, from bonds to stocks and commodities.

 

Deposits placed by banks with these nonbanks - the bulwarks of China’s infamous shadow banking system - had grown to more than $4 trillion as of September this year.

Okay, this is where things get more interesting.

Please bear in mind that (as we’ll explain later) a key pillar supporting the stability of China’s financial system is the maintenance of rising flows into the Chinese shadow banks.

This Bloomberg chart shows the rapid growth in China’s shadow banking system in recent years.

The WSJ explains that the reduction in flows into the shadow banks has led to redemptions and something had to be sold quickly...

But with less funds coming into banks now, less can go out. That has led to trouble for the nonbanks, which, after years of only ever-higher inflows, have started facing redemptions.

 

Banks’ claims on nonbanks have dropped 2% since peaking in June, according to Wind Info, equivalent to a $90 billion withdrawal of funds.

 

In addition to these redemptions, the cost for nonbanks of juicing returns on their investments by leveraging up has also risen because of the higher interest rates mentioned above.

 

That brings us to the bond market. Faced with redemptions, nonbanks have needed to sell something, and quickly. Offloading highly liquid government bonds has proven the easiest option.

 

Meanwhile, the nonbanks have held on to their higher-yielding corporate bonds, which at least have the benefit of helping them to maintain high returns.

We think that the Journal’s analysis is correct…but it doesn’t fully appreciate the bigger picture regarding shadow banks’ need to “maintain high returns”.

China’s shadow banks are, in part, engaged in Ponzi schemes, for example in the $4 trillion Wealth Management Products (WMP) sector. In May 2017, Forsea Insurance, one of China’s largest insurers, warned that there would be “mass defaults and social unrest” if it was prevented from selling new WMPs to meet payouts. See “Chinese Insurer Warns Of ‘Mass Defaults, Social Unrest’ Due To ‘Mass Redemption’ Run”.

A month earlier, Minsheng Bank, China’s largest private bank, was found to have committed a RMB 3.0bn fraud by selling non-existent WMPs. See “Investors Rage After 3 Billion Yuan Vanish From China"s Largest Private Bank”.

The sell-off in Chinese government bonds implies that the deleverage in shadow banking we identified in September in beginning to bite.

We are in the last lap of the Chinese Ponzi as, piece by piece, the whole decrepit system is being exposed. In the end, it will boil down to how many trillions of RMB the PBoC needs to print to make the banks and their shadow banking relatives whole.

David Stockman Warns "Don't Forget About The Red Swan"

Authored by David Stockman via The Daily Reckoning,

Given the anti-Trump feeding frenzy, we continue to believe that a Swan is on its way bearing Orange. But if that’s not enough to dissuade the dip buyers, perhaps the impending arrival of the Red Swan will at least give them pause.

The chart below comprises a picture worth thousands of words. It puts the lie to the latest Wall Street belief that the global economy is accelerating and that surging corporate profits justify the market’s latest manic rip.

What is actually going on is a short-lived global credit/growth impulse emanating from China. Beijing panicked early last year and opened up the capital expenditure (CapEx) spigots at the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) out of fear that China’s great machine was heading for stall speed at exactly the wrong time.

The 19th national communist party Congress scheduled for late fall of 2017. This every five year event is the single most important happening in the Red Ponzi. This time the event is slated to be the coronation of Xi Jinping as the second coming of Mao.

Beijing was not about to risk an economy fizzling toward a flat line before the Congress. Yet that threat was clearly on the horizon as evident from the dark green line in the chart below which represents total fixed asset investment.

The latter is the spring-wheel of China’s booming economy, but it had dropped from 22% per annum growth rate when Mr. Xi took the helm in 2012 to 10% by early 2016.

There was an eruption as dramatized in the chart. CapEx growth suddenly more than doubled in the one-third of China’s economy that is already saturated in excess capacity.  The state owned enterprises (SOE) in steel, aluminum, autos, shipbuilding, chemicals, building equipment and supplies, railway and highway construction etc boomed.

It was as if a switch had been flicked on by Mr. Xi himself, SOE CapEx soared back toward the 25% year-over-year rate by mid-2016, keeping total CapEx hugging the 10% growth line.

However, you cannot grow an economy indefinitely by building pyramids or any other kind of low-return/no return investment – even if the initial growth spurt lasts for years as China’s had.

Ultimately, the illusion of Keynesian spending gets exposed and the deadweight costs of malinvestments and excess capacity exact a heavy toll.

If the investment boom that was financed with reckless credit expansion is not enough, as was the case in China where debt grew from $1 trillion in 1995 to $35 trillion today, the morning-after toll is especially severe and disruptive.  This used to be called a “depression.”

China’s propagated spurt in global trade and commodities was artificial and short-term. It was done to flatter China’s rulers at the 19th party congress.

Now that a favorable GDP glide path has been assured, China’s planners and bureaucracy are already back at it trying to find some way to reel in its runaway credit growth and bloated economy before it collapses.

Downside Surprises in China Are Virtually Baked In

The sell-by date has expired on this latest China credit impulse, as evident in the chart below. During the first quarter of this year, total social financing (bank credit plus shadow banking loans) reached the incredible rate of $4 trillion per annum. That’s nearly one-third of China’s entire GDP.

The figure scared the daylights out of leadership in Beijing, who have now moved forcefully to reel in China’s debt machine.

What is coming down the pike is the great China Debt Retrenchment.  Expect a global braking motion that will get underway once Mr. Xi dramatically consolidates his power at the 19th party congress.

This has the potential to drastically weaken the global economy – and the impact on corporate profits should not be underestimated.

The Red Swan Has Now Gone Berserk

Half of the world’s GDP growth since the 2008 crisis has been in China, and that, in turn, was purchased by the greatest credit eruption in recorded history.

As China’s nominal GDP was more than doubling from $4.6 trillion in 2008 to $11.2 trillion in 2016, its national leverage ratio soared from 175% of GDP to 300% in less than a decade.

There’s reason to seriously doubt that Beijing can bring the Red Ponzi to a soft landing.  It cannot and will not permit the nation’s debt load to quadruple again during the next eight years, meaning that China’s days as the world’s ultimate stimulus machine are over.

The fading of the most recent China growth impulse will soon reveal that most countries, to adapt Warren Buffet’s famous metaphor, have been swimming naked from a fiscal perspective. It has left the world vulnerable to a renewed wave of funding crises as the ECB and other central banks attempt to launch monetary normalization.

In sum, during the last 19 months the Red Ponzi propagated a false upturn in the global economy that is already decisively reversing. This comes at the same time that central banks of the major developed world economies are finally bringing their printing presses to a halt.

The major central bankers have finally recognized that at $22 trillion on central bank balance sheets have become egregiously extended.  China is the epicenter of the world’s two decade plunge into central bank monetary fraud and credit explosion.  They have deformed and destabilized the very warp and woof of the global economy.

So, yes, even as the Orange Swan stumbles toward the Donald’s White House, there is a Red Swan following closely behind.

China PMIs Unexpectedly Accelerate Despite Ongoing Employment Contraction

Validating the recent surge in iron ore, which has jumped more than 18% from 2017 lows hit just two weeks ago on speculation the PBOC may be willing to flirt with another round of inflation, overnight Beijing reported an unexpectedly strong bounce in its manufacturing and service sectors. 

China’s NBS June manufacturing PMI came in at 51.7 for June, above both the previous reading of 51.2 and expectations of a 51 print, remaining comfortably above the 50-point expansion line. This was the second highest level of 2017, on the back of improving market sentiment and industrial upgrading, according to an NBS statement posted on its website, despite an ongoing troubling contraction in the employment subindex. Unlike the Caixin PMI, the official index tracks mostly larger, state-owned enterprises.

Two key sub-indices both increased from the previous month, although ominously the employment index declined for one more month and remained in contraction territory:

• The production sub-index went up to 54.4 in June, higher than 53.4 in May.


• The new order sub-index also increased to 53.1 in June from 52.3 in May.


• The employment index slightly declined to 49.0 in June, from 49.4 in May.

Both inflation indicators were higher, as the input prices index rose to 50.4 from 49.5 in May, and the output price index rebounded to 49.1 from 47.6 in May after three consecutive months of decline. Trade indicators were stronger: Both the new export order index and the import index increased by more than 1.0 pt, reaching 52.0 and 51.2 respectively. Raw material inventory inched up (to 48.6 vs. 48.5 in May) but finished goods inventory declined (to 46.3 vs. 46.6 in May). The suppliers" delivery times suggested longer delivery times (which imply better demand conditions) - it fell for a third consecutive month in June, from 50.2 in May to 49.9.

"Stronger foreign demand is helping to support manufacturing activity," Capital Economics" Julian Evans-Pritchard wrote. "The price components both increased for the first time since December, suggesting that downward pressure on producer prices may now be easing."

Separately, the official non-manufacturing PMI (comprised of the service and construction sectors at roughly 80%/20% weights) also surprised to the upside, rising to 54.9 in June from 54.5 in May. Services PMI rose to 53.8 from 53.5 in May, while construction PMI climbed to 61.4 from 60.4 in May.

The stronger than expected numbers "mean that momentum in the economy continues to be robust and we’ll have only a gradual slowdown at worst in the coming quarters," Dariusz Kowalczyk of Credit Agricole in Hong Kong, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. "China is doing very well."

As Bloomberg notes, economic activity this year has so far proven more resilient than expected - likely on the heels of the loan explosion at the start of the year which has since been tapered alongside China"s shadow banking crunch - giving policy makers time to focus on reining in financial risks and cooling a frothy property sector. Firmer global trade is boosting corporate profits and hiring, easing fears - for now - that efforts to cut excessive financial borrowing could derail the government’s target of 6.5% expansion in output.

Companies are assuming that curbs on excess leverage and the property sector will be transient this year, as the Communist Party won’t allow much economic pain before the leadership transition in the fall, according to a report published by research firm CBB International this week.

Goldman adds that judging from the NBS PMIs, June activity growth appeared to be healthy, however it adds that one caveat is that China’s mfg PMI trends seem to be at least slightly distorted by prices - thus the increase in output prices in June might have flattered somewhat the pickup in the headline PMI reading.

The Caixin manufacturing PMI release next Monday will give another early gauge of activity momentum in June.

Hedge Fund CIO: "Normally The Fed Would End This Bubble, But It Can't This Time For One Reason"

In his latest weekend notes, One River Asset Management CIO, Eric Peters, picks up where BofA"s Mike Hartnett left off on Friday when he said that the "QE Monster" will only end when "the Wall Street bubble" finally shocks the Fed. Yes, but what will "end it", or better yet, what will "shock" Yellen and company out of their complacency?

To this, Peters" response is that the Fed finds itself in a big "quandary" not so much due to the S&P500, and overall asset levels, which even Yellen now admits "pose risks to financial stability" as per the latest FOMC Minutes, but due to China:

“The real credit excesses haven’t been created here, they’ve formed in China, which leaves the Fed in a quandary.” Much as the Fed would like to have jurisdiction over every corner of global finance, they no longer control China.

He"s right: with rates on various Chinese debt instruments surging in recent months, as Beijing cracks down on shadow banking, any further tightening by the Fed may or may not impact the momentum-chasers that have sent Amazon above $1,000, but it will certainly have a dramatic impact on China"s cost of funding, which in turn would unleash the next deflationary shockwave around the globe, sending global rates tumbling once again as the reflationary, rate hike frenzy fizzles, and forces the Fed to promptly cut rates back to zero (if not negative).

Here is the quick and dirty from Eric Peters:

Quandary

“Classic late-cycle action,” said the CIO. “Vol-compression, loosening financial conditions, and a pain-trade that tilts forever higher,” he continued. “Normally the Fed ends it. Hiking aggressively, flattening the curve, widening credit spreads, and then the economy rolls.”

But this cycle is not quite like the others.

“The real credit excesses haven’t been created here, they’ve formed in China, which leaves the Fed in a quandary.”

Much as the Fed would like to have jurisdiction over every corner of global finance, they no longer control China. 

“By closing the capital account, the Chinese once again have complete dominion over their domestic credit machine,” continued the same CIO. “When they were actively opening up the capital account, China relinquished control over their interest rates to the Fed.” The volatility of Jan/Feb 2016 was one of many consequences; a lesson not soon forgotten.

Now that the Chinese have retaken control, economic volatility is more likely to come from within. “The warning sign for real problems will be a material decline in house price appreciation.”

Or, as we explained in March, "Why The Fate Of The World Economy Is In The Hands Of China"s Housing Bubble"

The (Dollar) Straw That Breaks The Camel's Back Of Political Correctness

Submitted by Eugen von Bohn-Bawerk via Bawerk.net,

One year ago we showed the following chart to explain the relative strong dollar that was on everyone’s mind at the time. With a second leg higher in the US dollar imminent, this particular chart will be more important than ever. Claims to dollars, such as demand and time deposits, or even more opaque money-like products created by the shadow banking system is just that, a claim or derivative on the final mean of payment, namely base money. When trust breaks down and owners of dollar claims rush to exchange them for actual dollars, the price of dollars goes up in relation to goods and services because there are not enough dollars to satisfy all the claims outstanding.

In monetary terms deflation takes hold and there are no market mechanism that can clear this anomaly (because it was never a proper market to begin with) as the price of the underlying and the derivative will move in perfect proportion to each other. Enter the Federal Reserve with their QE programs, id est base money creation, to meet dollar demand and stem the ensuing panic.

Unfortunately, something even more sinister has been going on with dollar derivatives internationally. In addition to domestic claims to dollars, there are a massive market for dollars internationally called Eurodollars. Foreign banks, particularly European banks, help global investors, merchants, exporters and importers trade and settle in USD, with very few actual dollars present. As long as everybody trust each other, this highly efficient system can operate smoothly with a high degree of leverage. Money market funds and filthy rich commodity exporters have a long tradition for placing their money in these markets allowing the financial system to benefit greatly.

 

In every over-leveraged system, small changes can have great ripple effects. Money market reform fully implemented last week forced money markets to float their NAV and implement liquidity fees and suspension gates as means to prevent a run on the fund; unless these are invested in government securities of course. If they do, the new rules do not apply. Therefore, it is of no surprise that money has rushed out en masse from prime funds and subsequently into government money market funds. Implementation of the new rules happened just as oil exporters from the Middle East and other SWFs had to pull out from money markets to fund rapidly rising twin deficits. The result has been a notably increase in the TED spread, signalling scarcity in available dollar funding internationally.

Troubled banks, like Deutsche Bank and the rest of its brethren in Europe, undercapitalized, burdened by an overzealous DoJ with a “you-tax-Apple-we-take-down-your-banks” attitude and funded mostly by AT1 CoCo bonds have felt the effects of higher funding costs more than any. A scramble for dollars are likely to ensue when one of the European behemoths fall.

The USD is coincidentally perfectly positioned for a breakout from an increasingly narrow channel. Last year, in November of 2015 it broke out from a similar channel on back of rational asset allocation based on the upcoming Federal Reserve rate hike in December of that year. Further four hikes were communicated in 2016, but so far none as materialized. The USD thus fell back into a new channel. This time it will be pushed up, not from rational expectations of more favorable yield differentials, but from fear as dollar scarcity increases.  The Fed may or may not raise rate in December, we do not care much as the US is heading straight into recession (as we have warned here several times) and that is when the stampede will begin in earnest.

A massively overleveraged financial system is once again on the brink. All it take is a second leg higher in the USD and European banking is dead in the water with monstrosities like Deutsche Bank being one of the most interconnected institutions on the planet. Knock-on effects on the global economy will be severe as dollar funding dries up. The USD SWAP line between ECB and the Federal Reserve will quickly reach a trillion dollars and the newly elected US Congress will throw hissy-fits as they are essentially asked to bail out the international Eurodollar market.

Political risk in Europe are on the rise as the once prosperous middle class are forgotten, both financially (cannot compete with low cost Chinese workers) and culturally (if you do not like what is happening to your neighborhood you are a deplorable and irredeemable racist bigot and we do not need to listen to you).

Losing life savings as deposits are bailed in left and right will be the straw that bring down any pretense of political correctness.