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Category: Professional Edition

Fed QE QE

These Charts Show The Fed Is the Market Ventilinflator

Lee Adler

Ever resolute, the Fed kept pumping the cash into Primary Dealer accounts. It kept at it until, as I calculated elsewhere, it had pumped in about $800 billion more than the dealers, and indeed the entire world, needed to absorb the flood of Treasury supply that was hammering it. That happened by the middle of April.

It was enough for the dealers to get back to their fun business of acquiring inventories of stocks, marking them up, triggering short squeezes, and convincing their herds of institutional sheep customers to follow the shorts and dive back into the market with whatever cash they had raised on the way down.

It worked, as we all know. Stocks have recovered around 55% of what they lost in the crash.

But the Fed has started to do the tighten up. Here’s what you need to know.

What Happens When Fed Makes Moral Hazard Permanent and Structural

Lee Adler

The Fed’s massive bailout of Primary Dealers and its alphabet soup loan programs for all other big financial players, have now made moral hazard permanent and structural. Why worry about risk when you know that the Fed will always take you off the hook when the shit hits the fan?

How can we know how this will play out? How can we know if these loans can ever be repaid? Will they be repaid through inflation, perhaps hyperinflation? Or will the borrowers simply default if the markets and economy recover too slowly?

Then who will be on the hook for the Fed’s guarantees when the Fed must assume the losses? Who pays? Taxpayers? Depositors? Everyone, again through massive inflation?

Of course, there’s always a chance that everything turns out just fine. The world returns to normal in a few months. The economy bounces back, and all the trillions lent by the Fed gets repaid timely, with no financial price to be paid.

We don’t know, but there will be telltale signs in the weeks ahead that will give us a heads up.

What’s the Context, Bear or Bull?

Lee Adler

What happens this week could tell us whether we’re in a bull or bear market.

As of 4:15 AM ET on Monday, virtually all of Thursday’s market gain has been wiped out. The S&P futures were trading at 2742, which would put the S&P cash index back below the centerline of the trend channel. Bears would have a foothold, but it’s where Monday finishes that matters, not where it starts.

Here are the critical parameters and levels you need to know to be positioned correctly.