Viernes 4

Así cierran los mercados internacionales el día de hoy, viernes 4 de Septiembre del año 2015. Puede que el próximo lunes venga movido, puede que no. Mientras esperamos, acá va una selección de notas del sitio Zero Hedge de los últimos dos días. Ofrecemos el título y parte, o todo, el texto de cada una de ellas:


Dow Dumps 600 Points From Last Friday's Panic-Buying Ramp, Drops 10% Year-To-Date

Remember last Friday? The Dow screamed 140 points higher in the last hour of the day to "prove" everything was awesome into the weekend. It wasn't! With The Dow down 300 points today, it is now 600 points below those panic-buying highs just a week ago...


Bull Or Bear? The Bull Market in Stocks May Have Ended Already
As expected, Wall Street’s shills were out in force on Wednesday. And the Dow rebounded from Tuesday’s rout – up 293 points. CNBC assured investors that the “U.S. is a place you should be investing.”

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New Record In Waiters And Bartenders Masks First Manufacturing Drop In Over 2 Years

In August, the reality of the oil crunch finally caught up with the BLS, when not only did the number of Mining and Logging employees decline again by 10,000 workers to 823K, the lowest since October 2011, an 8-month stretch of consecutive declines last seen during the previous recession driven by the ongoing weakness in the oil patch and the US shale drilling sector...

... but far more importantly for those tracking the US manufacturing recession, for the first time in over two years, the US manufacturing sector also lost workers, as 17,000 mfg lost their jobs. As shown in the chart below, this is the first time US manufacturing jobs have declined since July 2013, and the sudden drop means that only 28,000 manufacturing jobs have been added so far in 2015.

Considering the flurry of subprime-debt driven activity in US auto manufacturing, this was a very unexpected outcome, and those concerned that the US is about to enter, or already finds itself in, a manufacturing recession this will be the most important number in the months to come.

But don't worry: while US manufacturing may have peaked, US waiters and bartender are more than making up for it. In August, the US service economy grew by another 26,100 waiters and bartenders, bring the total to a record 11.1 million, thanks to 207,100 "food service and drinking places" jobs added in 2015: nearly 7 times more than manufacturing workers added over this period.
Putting this all together, since the start of the Second Great Depression, the US economy has lost 1.4 million manufacturing workers, but has more than made up for this with the addition ff 1.5 million waiters and bartenders.

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Record 94 Million Americans Not In The Labor Force; Participation Rate Lowest Since 1977

While the kneejerk headling scanning algos are focusing on the seasonally-adjusted headline monthly NFP increase which came in a worse than expected 173K, the presidential candidates - especially the GOP - are far more focused on another data point: the labor force participation rate, and the number of Americans not in the labor force. Here, they will have some serious ammo, because according to the BLS, the main reason why the unemployment rate tumbled to the lowest since April 2008 is because another 261,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force, as a result pushing the total number of US potential workers who are not in the labor force, to a record 94 million, an increase of 1.8 million in the past year, and a whopping 14.9 million since the start of the second great depression in December 2007 while only 4 million new jobs have been created.

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Fallout From Petrodollar Demise Continues As Qatar Borrows $4 Billion Amid Crude Slump

Early last month in “Cash-Strapped Saudi Arabia Hopes To Continue War Against Shale With Fed's Blessing,” we noted the irony inherent in the fact that Saudi Arabia, whose effort to bankrupt the US shale space has blown a giant hole in the country’s fiscal account, was set to tap the debt market in an effort to offset a painful petrodollar reserve burn.

“Saudi Arabia is returning to the bond market with a plan to raise $27bn by the end of the year, in the starkest sign yet of the strain lower oil prices are putting on the finances of the world’s largest oil exporter,” FT reported at the time. 
The reason this is so ironic is that at various times, we’ve characterized persistently low crude prices as essentially a battle between the Fed and the Saudis. Many struggling US producers would likely have been out of business months ago were it not for the fact that ZIRP has kept capital markets wide open, allowing otherwise insolvent drillers to stay afloat. Obviously, that works at cross purposes with Riyadh’s efforts to “preserve market share”, and so ultimately, the Saudis are betting their FX reserves can outlast ZIRP.

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What Happens After A Crash?

Our posts this week have dealt with analyzing the aftermath of the recent historic events that have unfolded in the stock market. However, of all the worthy topics that we have addressed, we have not directly addressed the most important one: the “post-crash” environment. Seeing as though the dramatic market decline in the latter half of August was the tremor from which all other price action has resulted, it stands to reason that we take a good look at it directly. In other words, how has the market historically behaved following similar “crashes”.

We put quotation marks around the word crash as the term is obviously open for interpretation. Certainly anyone who experienced the October 1987 events would be hard pressed to call anything since then a “crash”. However, for the sake of this study we are going to call the recent decline, and any similar such historical selloff, a “crash”. Specifically, we looked at all times in the S&P 500 since 1950 in which the index dropped at least 10% within 10 days (credit to fellow advisor and friend, Paul Schatz [@Paul_Schatz on Twitter] for the concept).

As it turns out, we identified 11 prior unique crash occurrences. By unique, I mean we eliminated any successive crashes and any crashes that were within the confines of a retest of a prior crash. Among the 11, 2 of them – July 1974 and September 2008 – continued to cascade lower, nearly unabated, for several more months. The other 9 resulted in an initial low in relatively short order. By initial low, we mean the first step within a market bottoming process. Those 9 are the subject of today’s Chart Of The Day, and this post. These are the months containing the 9 dates:

* May 1962
* May 1970
* October 1987
* August 1998
* April 2000
* March 2001
* September 2001
* July 2002
* August 2011

We are using these 9 as comparisons under the assumption that the August 25 low was an initial low of a bottoming process. While that is open for debate, considering the price action since then, most noteworthy of which is the fact that the low has not been breached, August 25 certainly fits the possible bill as an initial low.

So what can we learn from these 9 prior occurrences? Here is a chart tracking each of the events from the day of their initial low until the final day of the bottoming process (the bottoming process was determined to be complete if it led to a rally of at least several months).

It is another busy chart, but what sort of instruction can we take from it? Here are a few items of note:

* Of the 9, there was just 1 “V-Bottom” – September 2001 – that was never subject to a retest.
* The other 8 all went on to test the initial low at some point.
* 5 of the 9 eventually dropped below the initial low, if only marginally.
* The quickest retest/bottom process came after the March 2001 decline and lasted just 9 days.
* The longest bottoming process – following the July 2002 crash – lasted 55 days.
* The average bottoming process lasted 27 days (which would equate to October 2 in our present situation).
* The average bounce between the initial low and the end of the bottoming process was +11%. That would equate to 2074 in our current circumstances.
* The majority of the crashes (5) came after significant damage had already been done, i.e., the S&P 500 was anywhere from -7% to -25% below its 52-week high when the crash began.
* The other 4 (1987, 1998, 2000 and 2011) began from within 2.6% of the S&P 500?s 52-week high. The recent crash started at just -1.25% below the 52-week high.

It is not our intent to “predict” the path of prices of the ongoing post-crash period based on these historical comparisons. There is no guarantee that the market will follow any of these precedents, either individually or collectively. Who knows – prices could soar from here without any sort of retest…or they could cascade lower ala 2008. All we are trying to do is improve our odds of making sound investment decisions. In the pursuit of that, we have attempted to identify structurally similar “post-crash” periods for examination.

This examination would loosely suggest that the current bottoming process (assuming we are in one) may possibly persist for another month, with a possible higher bounce along the way before a possible retest of the August 25 lows.

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Losing Faith? Traders Dump Japanese Stocks At Fastest Pace In History

The narrative of the omnipotent central banker continues to be questioned with China's inability to save its own market the latest incarnation of investors losing faith. Nowhere has the religious zealotry been more fervent than in trading Japanese stocks where Abe and Kuroda have broken every independent rule in their manipulation of wealth-giving stocks. However - it appears their time is up, as Bloomberg reports, foreigners dumped 1.43 trillion yen of Japanese equities in the three weeks through Aug. 28, Tokyo Stock Exchange data updated Thursday show. That’s the most for any three-week span on record, overtaking the period when Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed in 2008.

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FX Traders Fear "Worst Case Scenario" For Brazil As FinMin Cancels Travel Plans, Rousseff Meets With Lula

It’s not that we want to pick on Brazil, it’s just that simply put, it’s one of the most important emerging markets in the world, which means that when depressed demand from China, plunging commodity prices, a shock devaluation from the PBoC, and the generally lackluster pace of global trade conspire to trigger an emerging market meltdown, Brazil is very likely to end up at the center of it all and sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happened. 

Late last week, we noted that Brazil officially entered a recession in Q2, a quarter which also ushered in the worst stagflation in a decade and saw unemployment rise to five-year highs. Then on Monday, the government officially threw in the towel on running a primary surplus (striking a major blow to market confidence in the process) and then yesterday, we got a look at industrial production in July which missed wildly, coming in at -1.5% m/m versus consensus of -0.01%. Meanwhile, exports cratered 24%.

We could go on. And bear in mind that the budget issue is complicated by the fact that Rousseff’s political woes are making budget cuts next to impossible to pass. As Italo Lombardi, senior LatAm economist at StanChart told Bloomberg earlier this week, the admission that the country would likely miss its primary surplus target underscores the trouble "Finance Minister Joaquim Levy faces in winning congressional approval for austerity measures and pushes Brazil’s credit rating closer to junk status." "Politics are making Levy’s life very difficult," Lombardi added.

So difficult in fact, that he may now resign and that, according to at least one trader, would be the worst scenario possible. Here’s Bloomberg with more:
Brazil’s real declined for a fifth straight day and fell to a new 12-year low as speculation grew that Finance Minister Joaquim Levy is closer to leaving his post amid budget turmoil.

A gauge of the rout’s momentum rose to a five-month high as a Valor Pro newswire columnist, citing unidentified people at presidential palace, reported that Levy canceled a trip to the Group of 20 meeting in Turkey and planned to talk with President Dilma Rousseff later Thursday. In a setback for Brazil, the Treasury scrapped an auction of local fixed-rated government bonds for the first time in 19 months as yields at a six-year high made borrowing expensive.

“Seeing Levy leave would be worse than Rousseff stepping down or even her impeachment,” Guilherme Esquelbek, a currency trader at Correparti Corretora de Cambio, said from Curitiba, Brazil. “His departure is the worst scenario we can have right now.”

Meanwhile, Copom is stuck between a rock and a hard place - that is, they can’t hike to support the currency because the economy is in such terrible shape. Here’s Goldman on Wednesday’s MPC decision to hold Selic at 14.25%:
One could argue that given the drifting currency (approximately 20% since June) it would even demand additional rate hikes if the monetary authority's objective is still to, with reasonable confidence, drive inflation to the 4.50% target by end-2016. However, given the rapidly deteriorating real activity picture and heightened political/institutional noise and uncertainty, near-term rate hikes are unlikely.  

And in the wake of last week's GDP data and Monday's confirmation of the budget blues, Barclays is out with a bit of decisively negative commentary both on the outlook for the economy and for the fiscal situation. Here's more:
We now forecast a 3.2% fall of real GDP in Brazil in 2015, to be followed by a 1.5% contraction the next year. The downside surprise in Q2 and the deeper recession in the second half of this year also imply a negative contribution to next year’s growth. Household consumption should continue contributing negatively to headline growth, together with fixed asset investment. 

The disappointment with fiscal execution, coupled with the lack of capacity of the government to negotiate structural changes in how expenditures grow, leads us to expect a fiscal primary deficit for this year and next of 0.3% and 0.5% of GDP, respectively. For 2015, the fiscal measures approved in Congress were reduced meaningfully from the original proposal and are contributing with only 0.53% of GDP to the fiscal balance. Even including those, we forecast total real fiscal revenues to fall 3.2%, as the growth slowdown is having the biggest negative contribution on this year’s result.


And the inevitable result (as we’ve been saying for months): 

The implication is a downgrade in less than one year. We believe the rating agencies will take off the investment grade rating in H1 16, starting likely in April by S&P, given the increased pace of deterioration of the macroeconomic juncture and the disappointment relatively to the agencies’ forecasts. Moody’s could follow suit in the second half of the year, if it becomes clear that the country will fail to achieve real GDP growth and the primary surplus as percentage of GDP near 2%, as the agency expects for 2017. At this point, it is very hard to foresee any meaningful change in the political and/or economic scenario that could avoid such an outcome.

Finally, in what is always the surest sign that a market-moving rumor is probably true, we got the official government denial this afternoon:

* LEVY SAYS HAS NO PLANS TO LEAVE BRAZIL GOVT: EL PAIS

Underscoring how serious the situation truly is, the headlines are still coming in with Bloomberg reporting that former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva "will travel to Brasilia tonight to meet with President Dilma Rousseff" for a one-on-one where the two will discuss "higher pressure on Finance Minister Joaquim Levy, 2016 budget proposal and possible restoration of CPMF tax." 

Clearly, this is bad news. All sarcasm and jokes aside, it looks as though Brazil may be about to step off the ledge here. You now have a President with an approval rating of just 8% convening an emergency meeting with the former President, a finance minister on the verge of pulling a Varoufakis, a plunging currency, a hamstrung central bank, and a nightmarish fiscal situation. 

So... who wants tickets to next summer's Olympic games in Rio?