Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - Want to Buy a Cookie?

Want to Buy a Cookie?

by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 91 = 16,367
SPX + 8 = 1865
NAS + 7 = 4234
10 YR YLD un 2.73%
OIL - .39 = 99.21
GOLD + 2.10 = 1312.70
SILV + .07 = 20.10

According to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price report, the home price index covering 10 major US cities increased 13.5% in the year ended in January. The 20-city price index advanced 13.2% for the year. Month to month, the 20-city index dropped 0.1%; the drop is not just weather related; from December to January, prices fell in 12 of the 20 cities Case-Shiller tracks.

Taking a look at a few cities: LA was down 0.3% for the month but up 18.9% for the past year, San Diego was up 0.6% for the month and 19.4% for the year, Phoenix was down 0.3% for the month but up 13.8% for the year, San Francisco was up 0.5% for January and 23.1% for the year, the hot spot was Las Vegas up 1.1% for the month and 24.9% for the year, to lead the nation.

The Commerce Department reports new home sales dropped 3.3% from January to February to a seasonally adjusted rate of 440,000. Sales fell in all regions except the Midwest, where they jumped 36.7%. Sales dropped 15.9% month to month in the West. The national median price for a new home was $261,800 last month, up from $260,800 in January. Compared with February 2013, the median price fell 1.2%. At the current sales pace there is a 5.2 month inventory.

A recent Trulia report gauges whether home prices are over or undervalued, and where. Nationally, home prices are still undervalued by about 5%. When home prices hit their bottom at the end of 2011, national home prices were about 15% undervalued. That’s no longer the case, and in some select markets rising prices are coming unchained from their long-term fundamentals. Six of the nation’s ten most overvalued cities were in California. Trulia figures the Orange County metro area is about 16% overvalued, and Los Angeles is 13% overvalued.

The Commerce Department also reported today that nationwide personal income growth slowed to 2.6% last year from 4.3% in 2012. Personal income rose 0.3% in January from a month earlier. Residents in every state saw weaker income growth from a year earlier. The personal income report measures everything Americans receive from all sources, including wages, salaries and property income. Several factors contributed to the slower overall income growth, including the expiration of a 2% payroll tax “holiday” last year. As a result, many people received salary bonuses and personal dividends in 2012, which boosted that year’s incomes. Earnings grew in 2013 in every industry except civilians who work for the federal government. Inflation pressures remained weak over the year, with the price index for personal consumption expenditures rising only 1.1% in 2013 from 1.8% in 2012.

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index rose to 82.3, up from 78.3 in February. Overall, consumers expect the economy to continue improving and believe it may even pick up a little steam in the months ahead, but they are feeling less optimistic about their current economic circumstances. Hope springs eternal.

Each year about this time, the Girl Scouts send forth minions to sell cookies for 7 weeks. Katie Francis, a sixth grader from Oklahoma City, set a new sales record of 18,107 boxes, topping the old record of 18,000; that works out to about 370 boxes sold per day; figure 12 hours a day, that works out to a sale every 2 minutes. Her secret to success: time, energy, and asking absolutely everyone she comes in contact with to buy cookies.

The Federal Reserve today published 11 research papers which tend to confirm information we have relayed in the past; big banks get a hidden subsidy in the form an implied bailout, or the idea they are too big to fail. The new research focuses on the primary bond market where banks sell their new debt to investors, instead of measuring the taxpayer subsidy through bank bond “spreads” in the secondary market. And the new research only covers up to 2009, so things may have changed a bit, but the biggest US banks enjoyed an extra $60 million to $80 million of cost savings per average new bond sale over their smaller competitors.

Fed staff wrote in one paper that a greater likelihood of government support leads to more risk-taking at big banks, including impaired lending and net charge-offs. Regulators have shied away from suggestions that they should break up banks, pointing instead to the new rules that require banks to reduce leverage, maintain a supply of assets they could sell quickly, and stop making risky trades with their own money. Officials say they also have made strides to ensure regulators are equipped to resolve big banks in a crisis rather than bail them out.

The Murdoch Street Journal is reporting the SEC is investigating whether a boom in complex new bond deals is being used to hide certain illegal risks. A number of likely cases are in the pipeline. Separately, the government has expanded an inquiry into how Wall Street banks may have been cheating their clients by mispricing certain bond deals.

If you are still trying to figure out what Bitcoin is, you are not alone, but the IRS thinks they have figured it out; it is not legal tender in any jurisdiction; it is property and should be taxed as such. That means that employers who choose to pay wages in Bitcoins will have to report those wages just like any other payment made with property, and Bitcoin income will be subject to the normal federal income withholding and payroll taxes. And the same goes for profits on the sale of Bitcoins, at least the Bitcoins that aren’t lost in the digital wallets of Mt. Gox.

Another study says that you should pay closer attention to annual shareholder meetings, and maybe the most important thing to watch is where the meeting is held. Companies that schedule annual shareholder meetings in unusually remote locations tend to announce bad news fairly shortly thereafter; the more surprising the location, the worse the news, and the harder the company's stock price falls. It’s not a hard and fast rule, just a general indicator.

Global markets have been increasingly concerned about the impact of slowing economic growth on Chinese financial institutions. Apparently the locals are also nervous. Hundreds of Chinese citizens had an old fashion run on the banks, trying to withdraw cash from branches of 2 small Chinese banks in the Jiangsu province after rumors spread about the solvency of one of them.

The Houston Shipping Channel remains closed today because of a weekend oil spill. The closure from this weekend has delayed shipments of crude and refined products in and out of the channel. Roughly 11% of the US refining capacity is transported through the channel. The incident was coincidentally timed around the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster. If the closure lasts much longer, refiners will begin to miss scheduled deliveries and companies expected to have product to load and offload may have to declare force majeure. You know what happens to oil and gas prices if that occurs and continues.

The White House and the House Intelligence Committee have leaked separate proposals that are supposedly aimed at ending the mass collection of Americans’ phone records. The full draft of the House bill is not yet available but it is tentatively named the “End Bulk Collection Act. The plan would have telephone companies hold on to phone data and the government could search data from those companies based on "reasonable articulable suspicion" that someone is an agent of a foreign power, associated with an agent of a foreign power, or "in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power". The NSA’s current phone records program is restricted to a reasonable articulable suspicion of terrorism.

A judge would reportedly not have to approve the collection beforehand, and the language suggests the government could obtain the phone records on citizens at least two “hops” away from the suspect, meaning if you talked to someone who talked to a suspect, your records could be searched by the NSA. A report in The Guardian says that coupled with the expanded “foreign power” language, this kind of law coming out of Congress could, arguably, allow the NSA to analyze more data of innocent Americans than it could before.

The New York Times reports the White House proposal would supposedly end the collection of phone records by the NSA, without requiring a new data retention mandate for the phone companies, while restricting analysis to the current rules around terrorism and, importantly, still requiring a judge to sign off on each phone-record search made to the phone companies.

We still don’t know what would happen to other types of bulk data collection, such as internet and financial records. Also, the NSA has been collecting phone data on people up to three hops away from a suspect so long as it had “reasonable articulable suspicion” that the suspect was involved in terrorism; then they hold that bulk data, dumping it into something they call a “corporate store” where they feel free to conduct further analysis even if they don’t have “reasonable articulable suspicion”.

The existence of the NSA program was disclosed and then declassified last year following leaks by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor. The current court order authorizing the collection of data is set to expire on Friday. The FISA court is expected to renew authorization for at least 90 days while changes are considered. The government has been unable to point to any thwarted terrorist attacks that would have been carried out if the program had not existed, but has argued that it is a useful tool.