Merrill Lynch: Infamia!

Apologies for the lapse into Italian, but it is a remnant of my childhood. My father had a remarkable talent for expressing strong emotion in this language as in no other way.

Until serious reforms are made in the banking system, and the accounts are squared with those who brought us to this misfortune, there can be no recovery, and no sustained return to individual liberty.

So, what would we like to do about this latest outrage?


Merrill Execs Pay Selves Bonuses Ahead of Schedule (and
Before BofA Closing)
Naked Capitalism

Playing fast and loose seems to be the theme of the evening... now we have the eleventh hour stealing of the silver by Merrill's top executives as one of the firm's final acts.

Let us remember the fact set: Merrill managed to get Bank of America to agree to buy it in September, elbowing aside Lehman. The deal is subject to shareholder approval, however. BofA, realizing it has acquired a garbage barge, threatens to scuttle the deal unless Uncle Sam lends a helping hand. Negotiations proceed behind closed doors (and neither Merrill nor BofA shareholders are told prior to the shareholder vote that BofA has agreed to do the deal subject to some form of government support).

Now we learn that after it was evident that the US taxpayer was going to subsidize the Merrill acquisition, the Merrill compensation committee accelerated bonus payments by a month to make sure they were paid out before the BofA deal closed.

Efforts are being made to minimize the amount involved (it is claimed to be only $3-$4 billion, but the fact is amounts were reserved in prior quarters that are excessive in light of full year performance. So the fact that some of the amounts were allowed for in previous quarters is misleading).

Were Merrill bankrupt, the bonus payments could be deemed fraudulent conveyance and clawed back. But we don't do either financial firm bankruptcies or clawbacks in this country...

Is Gold and the Balance of Power Shifting from the West to the East?

Here is an interesting set of charts, and a unique conclusion to match, from Moneyweek.

As we recall, the folks at GATA have been showing this sort of market analysis for some time now, to a cooler reception than a Madoff whistleblower at the Chris Cox retirement party.

We'd be open to hearing of other serious interpretations of this phenomenon. But be forewarned; to say it is just nonsense is, well, nonsense. It is a statistically valid hypothesis, albeit an unexplained and a bit odd, at least for the moment.

Can a money machine really exist in free and efficient markets? Economic theory says it cannot, that it must be due to some flaw or inefficiency, or an artificial scheme such as the regular returns from the Madoff Fund.

We might agree with the surmise that it involves the steady selling of leased gold from the West into the gold markets, but that could only be confirmed by an audit, and an admission from some large central bank that they have been obligating increasingly large amounts of their inventory into the public markets in a previously undisclosed manner.

The transaction costs are a problem if you are standing at the retail counter, we fear, so don't get any ideas about playing this trade. Its a sinecure for the big boys only, who can take advantage of market inefficiencies by trading in large, ever increasing volumes, like the whiz kids at LTCM did until they blew their trade book up.

Oddly enough, the data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency report on Derivates shows that only two banks, JPM and HSBC, are holding almost $124,000,000,000 in gold derivatives between them, approximately 98% of all gold derivatives in the world.

At $850 per ounce, that represents about 145,882,353 ounces of gold.

As the tides of monetary bubbles recede, curiosities are turning up on the beach every day.

MoneyWeek
Gold is shifting from West to East – along with the balance of power
By Dominic Frisby
Jan 21, 2009

Twice a day – at 10:30AM and 3PM - the price of gold is set on the London market by the five members of the London Gold Pool (HSBC, SocGen, Deutsche Bank, Scotia-Mocata and Barclays). This is known as the London fix and it's used as the benchmark to price gold, gold products and derivatives in markets around the world.

I've been looking at some charts and an astonishing pattern has become apparent. It's a pattern which, if you'd traded it methodically, would have earned you 1% a week over a period of 24 years. That compounds to a staggering 24,720,000%!

What is this spectacular strategy? Read on…

The astonishing pattern in London gold fixing

The strategy is really quite simple. You buy gold at the London PM fix (3PM), as the American markets have just opened for trading, and you sell your gold the following morning at the London AM fix (10:30AM), as the Asian markets are closing.

My thanks, as always, to Tom Fischer of Herriot Watt University for the charts below. The first demonstrates the weekly 1% gain that would have been yours since 1985 (the green line).



...What is more astonishing is how this pattern has accelerated since 2007. Sell gold in the morning, buy it back in the afternoon, and a cool 1.78% weekly profit will be yours:


Why would anyone want to manipulate the gold price?

What other free market shows such a consistent behaviour over time? Unless, of course, it's not a free market and the invisible hand of Big Brother is getting involved. Many of you will have read about manipulation of the gold price, and heard that there is a deliberate conspiracy to suppress the price of gold....

Rest of the story at MoneyWeek

SP Futures Hourly Chart at 3:30

The Nasdaq is in a similar pattern.

Note the long end of the Treasuries was down again as money came out looking for βeta. Quite often it comes out looking for risk and is consumed on these technical bounces. The dollar eased as well, and the yen is moving. We like our thought that the Pound is heading for parity with the euro, and may be with the dollar before Buck takes a dive.

We were net long for the day, but are flattening out and taking some profits, including a big Long Bond short, into the close, leaving a slight edge on to the short side of financials and long tech.

Dollar down gold up but nothing of substance. Watch to see if any of these moves extend. We're believers in the January full month indicator so obviously the action this week is important.

We may break out, so be aware of the resistance. We could see a short squeeze if we do.

AAPL and EBAY after the close. They may give us a better read on tech, now that IBM has become an accounting black box.

The word for the day is: FROSTY. Let the market show us the way short term.

The Geithner Nomination: The Wrong Man for the Job

"Summers was his mentor, but other sources call him a Rubin protégé."

The questions and testimony in the Tim Geithner nomination hearings this morning are interesting.

The topics discussed early on are billions more needed for the banks (or else), and reform is badly needed to control the deficit.

And of course the need to restore 'confidence.' Confidence is a touchstone word like 911. Fear and security. The carrot and the stick.

The reforms discussed were reducing Social Security and Medicaid, and lowering corporate income taxes.

It is the banks that have caused the current deficit problems, and banking reform was never even breached as a topic.

Now, having worked in the political circles, we know that there is little of substance to be discussed seriously at a nomination hearing such as this. Senators float out ideas important to their backers, and the nominee agrees that there is a problem, and that they will be open to those ideas.

But we thought it was interesting.

By the way, Geithner did avoid some substantial taxes, and in a most egregious way. Not only that, but once he found out that he had erred, he did not make good on prior errors, until he became the nominee.

This is not a 'reform' candidate. This is a Mr. Fixit, a son of TARP, a three page proposal presented under duress.

Tim Geithner is primarily a political operative with a grounding in international economics. He is not a banker, a financier. Yes, he held the important post of NY Fed Chief, and he made a botch of it. If anything he would be more of an asset at State, but not in the key role at Treasury. Is the Obama bench this weak that they had to resort to a tainted nominee as their first choice?

This is a vignette about what is wrong in this country: democracy is under continuing assault by corporatism.

It is also amusing to watch the Republican senators, still flush from a long orgy of deficit spending, favoritism, no-bid contracts, lies and corruption, to be newly born as the vestal virgins of thrift and public virtue.

Tim Geithner was widely traveled as a child, living overseas with his father who was an administrator fo the Ford Foundation. He attended Dartmouth College, graduating with a A.B. in government and Asian studies in 1983. He earned an M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in 1985. He has studied Chinese and Japanese.

After completing his studies, Geithner worked for Kissinger and Associates in Washington, D.C., for three years and then joined the International Affairs division of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1988. He went on to serve as an attache at the US Embassy in Tokyo. He was deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy (1995–1996), senior deputy assistant secretary for international affairs (1996-1997), assistant secretary for international affairs (1997–1998).He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Summers was his mentor, but other sources call him a Rubin protégé.

Tim Geithner: Too Close to Goldman Sachs to Be Treasury Secretary, Critic Says
by Aaron Task
Jan 21, 2009 12:22pm EST

Tim Geithner apologized for not paying his taxes and some Republicans criticized his involvement in the TARP program at today's hearing, but Barack Obama's nominee for Treasury Secretary appears on track for confirmation.

Congress is "all in a panic" and "really clueless" about this all-important member of Obama's cabinet, says Christopher Whalen, managing director and co-founder of Institutional Risk Analytics. "I'm just not sure Tim Geithner is the guy we should have driving the bus."

Beyond his tax gaffe, which will mainly serve to politically weaken Obama's pick, Whalen says Geithner is the wrong many for the job because of his decision-making as President of the New York Fed.

"I believe Tim Geithner only represents part of Wall Street - Goldman Sachs," he says, suggesting Goldman was the "primary beneficiary of the AIG bailout" and notes Goldman alum Stephen Friedman serves on the board of the NY Fed. (Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin, with whom Geithner had frequent meetings in the past year, are also Goldman alum.)...