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Business/Finance See other Business/Finance Articles Title: In Praise Of Price Discovery—–The Market Is Off Its Lithium This morning’s market is more erratic than Claire Danes off her lithium. Gold is soaring, the euro’s plunging, US treasury yields are in free fall, junk bonds are faltering, copper is bouncing, oil has rolled over, the Russell 2000 momos are getting mauled, the swissie has shot the moon, the Dow is knee-jerking down, correlations are failing……and the robo traders are flat-out lost. All praise the god of price discovery! For six years financial markets have been drugged into zombiedom by maniacal central bankers who have violated every known rule of sound money and financial market honesty. In expanding their collective balance sheets from $5 trillion to $16 trillion over the past decade, for instance, they have midwifed a planet- wide fiscal fraud. Politicians have been enabled to spend and borrow like never before because central banks have swapped trillions of public debt for electronic cash confected from nothing. Likewise, never have carry traders and gamblers been so egregiously pleasured by the state. After 73 straight months of ZIRP they are still pinching themselves, wondering if such stupendous largesse is real. They have bought anything with a yield and everything with prospect of gain, financed it for nothing and collected the arb—–while being swaddled in the Fed’s guarantee that it would never surprise them or perturb their trades with unannounced money market rate changes. And so they wallowed in their windfalls, proclaiming their own genius. Does a pompous dandy like Bill Ackman end up purchasing an absurdly priced $90 million Manhattan condo just “for fun” because markets operate on the level? Do his petulant brawls with other grand “activist” speculators like Carl Icahn mark investment genius or the machinery of honest capitalism at work? No they don’t. There is absolutely nothing honest, productive or fair about the central bank dominated casinos which have morphed out of what used to be legitimate money and capital markets. Indeed, all the requisites of stability, efficiency and honest price discovery have been destroyed by the monetary central planners. The short sellers have been eradicated. Downside insurance against a broad market swoon has become dirt cheap. Momo traders have thereby been enabled to earn unconscionable returns because their carry costs have been negligible and their hedging expenses nearly nothing. Accordingly, the chart below of the S&P500 since the March 2009 bottom does not represent a market at all; it traces the central bank enabled casino in full bloom, the buy-the-dips mania in overdrive. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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