Thursday, June 21, 2012

Euro banks getting real stress tests

Every time the Eurozone, or any country does a bank stress test, you can be certain it's a slobbering pack of lies. The last Eurozone bank stress test complete in July, 2011, had only 8 banks fail based on their Tier 1 capital ratios.
Those eight European banks not strong enough to withstand a prolonged recession need to raise 2.5 billion Euros in capital, an industry health check aimed at reviving investor confidence showed on Friday.
The entire Euro banking system only needed 2.5 billion Euros, and that was only in the case of a prolonged recession. To date, I am unaware of any official recession being called in Europe. Mild slow down is how I've read it from official sources.

Today, two independent auditors released results showing that just Spanish banks need from 16-25 billion Euros, 6 to 10 times the amount needed for all of Europe last year. That is, unless those banks face an adverse scenario, in which case they will need up to 62 billion Euros, 25 times the amount needed by all European banks from the stress test last year.

Since every stress test is a slobbering pack of lies, the real capital needs of Spanish banks alone is probably around 250 billion Euros, roughly 100 times as much as all European banks supposedly needed last year.

Real stress tests are coming, and the liars will break under the pressure.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Gold vs. US debt linear regression update



The R-squared is 0.93.

Best fit price is 1,679.80.
One sigma below is 1,597.07.
One sigma above is 1,762.53.
Two sigma below is 1,512.79.
Two sigma above is 1,846.81.

Usual and customary disclaimers. Correlation is not causation. This is not investment advice.

Charlie Munger says that gold is only useful to Jews in the 1930s.

Warren Buffett says stocks beat gold, but he has been wrong for the last 11 years in a row. Maybe Buffett will be right this year.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Taps for TIPS

My good friend, the 20-year TIPS yield, sadly went negative today at minus 0.03 percent. He will be missed by positive yields everywhere.

See also: Death of 20 year TIPS