20-day equity put:call average at lowest level since at least 2003.

Pej at realitylenses.blogspot.com dug up the raw data and put together this chart of the 20-day average:

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The running average of the equity put:call ratio is extremely predictive of near-term market moves. It is mean reverting, and deep dips like this indicate a high degree of bullish complacency among options traders.

Complacency still extreme

Even if this is just a small correction in a continuing rally (which it is very dangerous to assume), the market has a lot of room left to shake things up. The 20-day average equity put call ratio is still at an extremely suppressed level:

Indexindicators.com

Here is the raw data since 2004, the last time we saw such a low running average of CPCE. Stocks went nowhere for about a year after that. They should be so lucky this time…

stockcharts.com

Such long-running lows must be balanced out with more than a bit of fear. One other thing that is noteable in this chart is how the Panic of ’08 only produced marginally higher put:call readings than the stagnation of ’04.

Manufacturers: 70% of jobs lost are not coming back.

This via Dave Rosenberg (free sign-up required):

BLEAK JOB MARKET OUTLOOK

We said before that what really stood out in this “Great Recession” was the permanency of the job decay. Of the eight million jobs lost, three-quarters were in positions that are not likely coming back.

We just heard from the National Association of Manufacturers that fewer than 30% of the manufacturing jobs lost in the sector will be recouped in the next six years. So here’s a bit of math: if this holds true for the economy as a whole, and assuming a normal cyclical upturn in the labour force participation rate, then the nationwide unemployment rate would be 15% in six years’ time. How anyone can believe that we can squeeze inflation out of that scenario is truly one of life’s many mysteries.

We have to let Kondratieff winter play out and do its job of debt liquidation before the long-term employment cycle can start up again. With extend-and-pretend and mark-to-fantasy, this is going to be a long process.

Long Wave Analyst

As for manufacturing jobs, good luck with that. The US educational system pretty much seals the fate of anything engineering rated — my advice there is keep your kids out of those unionized prisons. Better to pool resources with friends and hire tutors and (Chinese-speaking) nannies. I wonder, how many government teachers can an iPad replace?

Video: Public employee of the year awards (SNL)

Mish put this up a few days ago. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a must-watch.
http://www.popmodal.com/nvp/player/nvplayer.swf?config=http://www.popmodal.com/nvp/econfig.php?key=eb054f3ea718f61adfa1

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This version may play better in the US:

http://www.hulu.com/embed/AmuCTb1tvO-5YOc5N-97Mg

This is why your state and local governments are bankrupt, as well as the national governments of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and probably soon France.

Selling munis today is like selling Greek bonds six months ago — the numbers guarantee default. The only question is whether or not there are bailouts, but like with the GIPSI states, there will be a lot of uncertainty leading to higher rates in the interim, and in the end they can’t all be bailed out.

Look at these rates. Considering the risks, that’s a pretty skimpy premium over Treasuries, even considering the tax advantage.

Source: Bloomberg.com

James Grant: Put bankers’ own assets on the line again.

The market is the best regulator. After almost 100 years, it’s time we brought it back.

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Jim Grant has been the living best banking historian since 1995 when Murray Rothbard kicked the bucket. Last week in WaPo, he put forth is old-time solution to banking reform: make bank executives and even shareholders personally liabile for depositors’ losses.

The trouble with Wall Street isn’t that too many bankers get rich in the booms. The trouble, rather, is that too few get poor — really, suitably poor — in the busts. To the titans of finance go the upside. To we, the people, nowadays, goes the downside. How much better it would be if the bankers took the losses just as they do the profits.

Of course, there are only so many mansions, Bugattis and Matisses to go around. And many, many such treasures would be needed to make the taxpayers whole for the serial failures of 2007-09. Then again, under my proposed reform not more than a few high-end sheriff’s auctions would probably ever take place. The plausible threat of personal bankruptcy would suffice to focus the minds of American financiers on safety and soundness as they have not been focused for years.

“The fear of God,” replied George Gilbert Williams, president of the Chemical Bank of New York around the turn of the 20th century, when asked the secret of his success. “Old Bullion,” they called Chemical for its ability to pay out gold to its depositors even at the height of a financial panic. Safety was Chemical’s stock in trade. Nowadays, safety is nobody’s franchise except Washington’s. Gradually and by degree, starting in the 1930s — and then, in a great rush, in 2008 — the government has nationalized it.
No surprise, then, the perversity of Wall Street’s incentives. For rolling the dice, the payoff is potentially immense. For failure, the personal cost — while regrettable — is manageable. Senior executives at Lehman Brothers, Citi, AIG and Merrill Lynch, among other stricken institutions, did indeed lose their savings. What they did not necessarily lose is the rest of their net worth. In Brazil — which learned a thing or two about frenzied finance during its many bouts with hyperinflation — bank directors, senior bank officers and controlling bank stockholders know that they are personally responsible for the solvency of the institution with which they are associated. Let it fail, and their net worths are frozen for the duration of often-lengthy court proceedings. If worse comes to worse, the responsible and accountable parties can lose their all.
The substitution of collective responsibility for individual responsibility is the fatal story line of modern American finance. Bank shareholders used to bear the cost of failure, even as they enjoyed the fruits of success. If the bank in which shareholders invested went broke, a court-appointed receiver dunned them for money with which to compensate the depositors, among other creditors. This system was in place for 75 years, until the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. pushed it aside in the early 1930s. One can imagine just how welcome was a receiver’s demand for a check from a shareholder who by then ardently wished that he or she had never heard of the bank in which it was his or her misfortune to invest.

Nevertheless, conclude a pair of academics who gave the “double liability system” serious study (Jonathan R. Macey, now of Yale Law School and its School of Management, and Geoffrey P. Miller, now of the New York University School of Law), the system worked reasonably well. “The sums recovered from shareholders under the double-liability system,” they wrote in a 1992 Wake Forest Law Review essay, “significantly benefited depositors and other bank creditors, and undoubtedly did much to enhance public confidence in the banking system despite the fact that almost all bank deposits were uninsured.”

Like one of those notorious exploding collateralized debt obligations, the American financial system is built as if to break down. The combination of socialized risk and privatized profit all but guarantees it. And when the inevitable happens? Congress and the regulators dream up yet more ways to try to outsmart the people who have made it their business in life not to be outsmarted…

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For the record, I agree 100% with Grant’s solution. Moral hazard is THE cause of the de-facto bankruptcy of nearly every major bank in the US.
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The US banking system pre-1913 was not perfect (unscrupulous bankers were always trying to use the power of the government’s guns to game the system), but it was much safer and more honest than today’s.
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Bankers did not yet have a license to blow bubbles, since there were no black checks from their creation, the Federal Reserve, which can simply print paper money to bail them out in the inevitable busts. Before the Fed, their own assets were on the line, and before FDIC, the depositors’ assets were at risk. These two parties had a very strong incentive to keep lending standards prudent.
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There were booms and busts, but they were localized, and at no time did the entire banking system become insolvent like it has been since 2008. Weak banks lost their depositors to those who had been prudent, and depositors knew that they were taking a risk when they chose a bank paying higher interest.
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In sum, the market is the best regulator. It’s time we brought it back.
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David Rosenberg warns: Chinese stocks lead commodities markets.

I’ll let his chart do the talking:

Source: gluskinsheff.net

To very little fanfare, the Chinese stock market — the first index to turn around in late 2008 — has slipped into a bear market. It is down 15 % from the nearby high and 20% from last year’s interim peak. Why this is important is because the Shanghai index leads the CRB commodity spot price index by four months with a 72% correlation (and over an 80% correlation with the oil price). Don’t get us wrong — we are long-term secular commodity bulls; however, we have been agnostic this year from a tactical standpoint — never hurts to take profits after a double!

Sign up to receive his daily emails here.

Take this week’s equity drop seriously.

Longs are playing with fire here. This market is at least as dangerous as 2007 or 2000. What happens when this multi-decadal asset mania fizzles out, like they all do? The last 12 months show that it won’t give up the ghost without a fight, but it is very long in the tooth, as is this huge rally. Also, the short-term action of smooth rallies followed by sudden drops is uncannily similar to 2007.

Stocks left the atmosphere in 1995, but since 2000 gravity has been re-asserting itself. After extreme overvaluation comes extreme undervaluation. On today’s earnings and dividends, even average or “fair” multiples would put the Dow near 4000, right back to 1995.

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Charts from Stockcharts.com

A note on gold and the dollar:

I suspected a few weeks ago that gold had a rally coming, and now that we’ve seen it I’d be careful to use stops and not get too confident.

I still like gold for preservation of purchasing power through this secular bear market in real estate and stocks, but when financial markets turn down again in earnest it won’t be spared. Remember, it kept going to new highs in late 2007 and early 2008 after stocks had peaked, but then tanked with everything else when panic hit. Cash is still king, especially in US dollars and Treasury bonds. We may have only seen the start of this deflation.