Word of the Day: Gainsay

Word of the Day for Friday, April 24, 2009

gainsay \gayn-SAY; GAYN-say\, transitive verb:

1. To deny or dispute; to declare false or invalid.
2. To oppose; to contradict.

In our present, imperfectly postmodern world, where most information still takes the potentially embarrassing form of printed matter lurking in archives, liars still must position themselves so that the historical record may not easily gainsay them.
-- Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

But, owing to government's cynical policy of inaction, suppression and hoping the problem would go away, there was nothing to gainsay it either.
-- Mary Riddell, New Statesman, July 26, 1996

Gainsay comes from Middle English geinseien, from gein-, "against" (from Old English gegn-, gean-) + sayen, "to say," from Old English secgan.

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for gainsay

SP Futures Hourly Charts and Short Term Indicators

The market is being supported in a reflationary ramp. The volumes are light, and the action is being dominated by traders who are skittish, and not determined buyers with the conviction to hold.

Is the government involved in propping this market? Are Ben and his friends at Treasury trying to mask the weakness in the banking system?

Of course they are. The proper question is really how long can they hide their errors and mismanagement, and the damage they have caused and are causing to the national economy, if not that of the globe?

These are frightened men, many of whom have compromised their integrity already. Do not underestimate the rationales they will apply to justify actions you, the ordinary person, might consider inconceivable.

The Setup in the US Equity Markets and SP Futures Hourly Chart

The action in the SP futures market has been particularly heavy handed and blatant since the heads of the money center banks met with the Community-Organizer-in-Chief at the White House. This market is being shoved around like a gaijin granny on the Tokyo subway in rush hour.

To our minds, it is just as likely that we are being set up for a terrific leg down. In our experience the big dogs tend to dominate certain portions of the short side at the apogee of a stock market pump. Our target for a failure point on the SP June futures is about 858-864.

This market is utterly overbought according to the McClellan Summation Index. Let's see if they can keep it floating up. This does not look like a sustained ramp however, but the pump that sets up the dump.

At some point the equity market will start moving higher and keep going, to fantastic levels perhaps, if a serious inflation sets in. The stock markets in the Weimar Republic were spectacular, if one ignored the reality behind the appearance. We think it is far too early in the game for this, but are keeping an open mind to all possibilities.

The best probability is that we are seeing a pump and dump, in order to provide some income to the beleaguered banks through their proprietary trading desks. We have not been tracking it, but one has to wonder if Goldman Sachs fully placed its large secondary equity offering designed to pay back their TARP funds. The markets often miraculously levitate in sympathetic conjunction with key IPOs and equity tranches.

The banks must be restrained, and the financial system must be reformed, before there can be any sustained economic recovery.

SPY Have Become Hard To Borrow

Posted by Tyler Durden at 9:33 AM
Developing story: Traders confirm several locations indicating SPDRs are no longer automatic borrow and have made their way to the Hard To Borrow list: pre-borrow call is needed versus automatic short prior, as not enough underlying inventory.

Have fun hedging the market when you can not short. Wholesale market squeeze is being orchestrated.

At times such as these, the Cafe uses several indicators to test the nature of a rally. One simple method however is to just watch a parallel market. We like to watch the Nadaq100 futures for confirmations when the SP is being used to manage a market move.

Wells Fargo's Papier-Mâché Earnings Report

This just in from Dave the Bond Trader.

We would not have minded this bit of accounting chicanery so much, if Wells had not accompanied their earnings with so much "master of the universe" bravado and bluster about their superior banking management.

But we suppose when you are down on your chips and running a bluff, you have to give out the right sort of attitude and moral high ground to make it work, to hide the fact that you are just crooking the books like everyone else.

That smoke you feel being blown up your backside is nothing more than legalized accounting fraud being presented to the world in the form of Wells Fargo's 1st Qtr 2009 earnings release. As suspected, the infamous "record profits" preannounced 2 weeks ago by Wells Fargo are nothing more than a result of our Wall Street-financed Governmnet, including our President, forcing the FASB to change the way big banks account for toxic assets. As per WFC's earnings release today:

"The net unrealized loss on securities available for sale declined to $4.7 billion at March 31, 2009, from $9.9 billion at December 31, 2008. Approximately $850 million of the improvement was due to declining interest rates and narrower credit spreads. The remainder was due to the early adoption of FAS FSP 157-4, which clarified the use of trading prices in determining fair value for distressed securities in illiquid markets, thus moderating the need to use excessively distressed prices in valuing these securities in illiquid markets as we had done in prior periods"

Essentially, what WFC did was post $5.2 billion mark to fantasy gains, which were then added into its revenues, by reversing out previous charges expensed against their securities and loans held for sale. Without this gain, Wells Fargo loses a couple billion.

In looking at WFC's balance sheet, I see that their "securities held for sale" miraculously jumped to 27% of their net loans vs. being only 21% of loans at the end 2008. This is obviously WFC taking full advantage of the new mark to fantasy accounting standard and piling as much toxic waste into this category and marking the price levels up substantially. Be really interesting to see what kind of worthless crap was conveniently moved into this category.