US Deposits In Perspective: $25 Billion In Insurance, $9,283 Billion In Deposits; $297,514 Billion In Derivatives

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-19/us-deposits-perspective-25-billion-insurance-9283-billion-deposits-297514-billion-de

The $25 billion in touted deposit insurance is supposed to preserve and protect (granted not in their entirety) some $9,283 billion in total US deposits. A far bigger problem, however, is when one considers the "asset" side of the US banks' ledger: remember deposits are unsecured liabilities. And for US banks, sadly, over the counter derivatives represent the vast majority of "off the books" assets. According to the latest OCC quarterly report, the total derivative notional outstanding of the Top 25 holding companies is $297,514 billion, or nearly $300 trillion. In other words there are 32 times more notional derivatives than there are total deposits, while the ratio of gross derivatives to deposit insurance is a concerning 11,900-to-1.

Gold--due for a pause--or ready to explode again?

I questioned whether gold was due for a pause a couple days ago, as the price of gold kept spiking up, breaking resistance levels. Well, the price shot up again overnight in Asia, BUT the mining shares didn't move much this morning. So I hedged this morning, not selling my positions, instead buying a couple puts, which will profit should ABX correct. Think of it as a cheap form of insurance in case gold pauses--without having to trigger a taxable event from profit-taking.

The price of the mining shares usually lead the actual price of the underlying commodity. In other words, it's gone up too fast and is looking heavy. There's that Physics training kicking in again...:-)

Having said that, I'm still bullish on gold medium- and long-term, as the fundamentals are unimpaired, to borrow a quote from Jim Rogers. But gold mining shares do look a bit tired at these levels. More conservative investors may want to take some profits off the table--a 100% profit in two months is nothing to sneeze at.

What happened?

The stock market, and pretty much every other assets are plummeting due to hedge fund, mutual fund, and private equity firm redemptions. Investors are bailing out, so these funds have to sell assets--any good assets to raise cash. They can't sell the bad assets because no one wants them. So they are unloading good assets at low prices--that's why value players are salivating, but they keep getting burned because assets at cheap prices are getting hammered and getting even cheaper. This tug of war between bottom fishers and forced asset sellers is what's causing the high volatility. Overall, tho, the sellers are winning, as they are panic selling in droves, swamping any brave buyers. Eventually, these buyers lose out (at least in the short term), as even the savviest value buyers are seeing their entry points as being too early and too high, despite metrics that suggest they are good buys. Ultimately, over the long-term, these value buyers will be proven correct, but for now, guys like Buffett and Soros have seen their positions drop by more than 10-20%, despite buying assets that have already dropped more than 50% already.

For example, if a solid company's share price has already dropped 80%, it may seem cheap. It may be, but that doesn't preclude it from dropping another 50%. Let's say a stock is at $100 last year during its peak. It is now at $20. A Buffett buys at that price, thinking he's getting it at a bargain. He may be right (based on projected earnings growth, or more correctly, discounted cash flow), but that doesn't mean the stock won't drop to 10 before bottoming out, say next year. Ultimately, if the stock is worth $50 a share, Buffett may ultimately win out (he usually does), but only if he has a long-term view. While he may be annoyed, and since he's got plenty of cash, he can wait it out.

Realize that the fixed-income market dwarfs the equities (stock market)--that's why the subprime mortgage debt bomb obligerated everything around its wake. I wrote a quick email to some folks recently:

"That's not entirely correct. Derivatives allowed investment banks to transfer that risk to shareholders and get it off their books. When default rates on sub prime mortgages reached inevitably high rates, the credit default swaps (CDS) blew up, as they insured the sketchy collaterized debt obligations (CDO).

These CDS's are basically contracts which insured these mortgages against default--in this case, highly-risky subprime mortgages to marginal borrowers. The problem was that insurers like AIG didn't charge enough premium to insure these mortgages, as everybody assumed California real estate prices would always go up, and that few borrowers would actually default. With home prices/income ratios above 10, this assumption was unsustainable. And because these derivatives were highly-leveraged ($1 could control $40 or $100 due to Wall Steet's repackaging of said debt), if those assumptions turned sour just a little bit, whatever little equity put up as collateral disappeared. And once the selling of assets to unwind from those positions began, the vicious spiral just fed upon itself, as everybody had to de-leverage from their overly leveraged positions. It became a Category 5 game of hot potato, and the investors (hedge funds, pensions, institutional money) got burned, while chasing the high yields during good times.

Wall St. did a great job of selling this "AAA" paper as non-risky, when they were extremely speculative. The ratings agencies were unknowing perpetrators of this shell game. Wall St. repackaged these @#@% loans, and the ratings agencies gave it their blessing as low-risk, investment-grade securities. What compounded the problem is that some of this paper was created without even any mortgages to back them.

Derivatives by definition use leverage. It can be useful for hedging strategies, but hedge funds didn't use them as hedges--they used them as levers to squeeze out more returns. When the bets turned against them, they had to sell assets to raise cash as investors headed for the exits. This de-levering is causing markets to tumble.

I could go on ad nauseum, but I think you get the picture. I don't worry about what happened--I was able to avoid most of the roadkill, as I was out of the market in June. I am concerned about what's going to happen next, and I'm afraid the worst is ahead of us. We are going to see a carnage unseen since the Great Depression, as the unwinding of positions is not over yet--not even close. Thankfully, I've got a strategy in place for me and my clients which will enable us to not only survive this crisis, but also profit handsomely from it.

Without going into details, it does involve certain currency plays, financial institutions here and abroad, and various asset plays, including equities (surprisingly). More shoes will drop, and there will be bigger shocks and bank failures, some unfathomable only a few months ago. I predicted GM would be insolvent as far back as two years ago when people thought I was crazy (all documented in my blog). Last month, CNBC splashed it on their headlines, and now CNN has it on theirs.

I can send you a link to my blog, as well as what to Google. I will not do the research for you, but I will point you in the right direction. I will tell you the strategies will not be mainstream or conventional, but then again, conventional hasn't worked, has it?

I will give you this thought in case you think I am ringing alarm bells unnecessarily. Everybody is bitching and moaning about a $700 billion bail out (which is less than $1 trillion). Recall I mentioned CDS's as basically insurance--only they were labeled by Wall St. as "swaps" in order to avoid regulation (insurance contracts are heavily regulated, and you can't pile leverage on them). They were creating these insurance contracts with no regulation, and hence, no reserves to cover them. Guess how many swaps were written, and how big the derivatives market is? Some are predicting over $500 trillion! (A definitive number is difficult to calculate since these products were so complex, were sold so many times, and generally not transparent). In other words, there's no bailout that will mitigate this deleveraging. The current band aid will only prolong the process, but the perfect storm will come down upon us--soon."

As an edit: we've lost $10 trillion in equities market capitalization (net worth) in the last two months. That figure will seem minuscule when these derivatives blow up in our faces, and when Paulson et. al will no longer be able to hide it from the public. Read his past comments over the past year and a half. You will see he has hoodwinked us all along.

Lehman and Merill Lynch this morning....

I wrote this in response to a concerned client:

XXXXX, on the contrary. These firms (investment banks, commercial banks, and insurance companies) invested in mortgage-backed securities, thinking they were safe. Little did they know it was just another asset bubble bursting.

Life insurance companies are more conservative by nature, investing premium payments in short- and long-term bonds, and in the case of indexed products, are linked to stock indexes like the S & P 500. With your contracts, if the S & P tanks, you are still guaranteed a 1% floor--which isn't much, but it's better than losing 15% or more, which is what your current stock portfolio is doing. They are able to guarantee the 1% due to options trading, much like they cap you at 15%.

Expect a big loss in the stock market this morning, as this is really, really bad news, but not something I didn't warn you all about several months and years ago. I predicted the real estate bubble, and it's coming to fruition as well. While the more expensive neighborhoods of the bay area are holding up, expect high-end prices to start declining. Manhattanites continue to brag their real estate market has held up, but do you really think that will continue, now that hundreds of billions of dollars are vanishing? Not only are Wall Street bonuses going to disappear at the end of this year, but many investment bankers will be lucky to have jobs. Having a consortium of banks to band together to raise money to prevent the next disaster is akin to gathering 10 cancer victims into a leaky boat--a few will get tossed over the side. First Bear Stearns, Countrywide, now Lehman and Merrill Lynch. Don't forget insolvent Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, who only hold trillions of dollars of mortgages (70% of all US mortgages). Check out their share prices--they've lost over 90% of their market cap, which makes the tech bubble look like Disneyland.

Expect more big losses and layoffs--it is going to be a bloodbath--the biggest since the Great Depression. Insurance companies were the only ones standing in the aftermath of the Depression, as thousands of banks failed. They set premiums based on actuarial data, not based on speculative lending practices. Banks use 10:1 leverage, which works great in a growing economy, but is terrible in a downturn, as bad loans mount. Expect Washington Mutual to fold, too--unless they get bailed out. It amazes me that people still think banks are safe, despite pervasive evidence to the contrary. How many more banks have to fail before people get it? In any case, insurance companies are forbidden by law to implement that type of leverage.

The VC market has dried up as well--last quarter was the first time ever that there were no IPOs. The liquidity crisis is spreading up and down the food chain--couples with high FICO scores and sizeable assets are having trouble getting financing. Cash is more important than ever, so curb your spending and hoard it. Don't mess around this time, this ride is going to be hell.

In summary, this is EXACTLY what should be doing in a severe downturn, where every asset you turn to is dropping like a Thai thunderstorm downpour. The next 2 (or more years) will be very difficult, and when the last bulls finally turn bearish, basically giving up all hope and expecting the world to end. hopefully we will reach a bottom. Real estate agents and stock brokers have been preaching to me their respective markets will turn around for the last two years, and given their polyannish outlook, I know this hellstorm is going to last longer. They're like Colonel Klink in Hogan's Heroes--whatever they say will happen, do the exact opposite.

If you had to pin me down, the meltdown recovers in 2010, which means you can expect a climactic abyss in stock markets late 2009. THAT will be the time to nibble at good companies who got thrown out with the baby wash--the companies themselves are solid, but the financial hurricane took them down unfairly Pick the winners of each struggling group: Goldman Sachs will be a screaming buy in a couple years, but don't try to catch a falling knife--it'lll cut you. Wait till they bottom and bounce off the bottom a couple times. It's better to be late when bottom-fishing (buying), and it's better to be early when selling.

Of course, I could be wrong and too optimistic on the recovery time, at which point, all bets are off. Just to give you an idea of how bad it is, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway just sent a directive to one of his portfolio companies, a reinsurer who guarantees funds above the FDIC limit of $100,000 for banks. They lost a mint in guaranteeing losses when IndyMac went under recently, so the reinsurer just notified thousands of banks they are no longer guaranteeing accounts above $100,000! Do you think wealthy depositors are going to react to that?

As an aside, the formerly venerable Lehman firm was the preemiment fixed-income (bond) banker who got themselves in trouble with junk offerings years ago. Buffett actually stepped in and helped bail them out at the time. Obviously, he's not bailing them out this time. These subprime mortgages are the latest cyanide, only this time the Kool-Aid is a lot more toxic. You thought I was a doom and gloomer earlier, and it turns out I understated the magnitude. And unfortunately, it's going to get even worse.