Salient to Investors:
David Stockman writes:
A growing chorus of investors blamed last week’s stock market sell-off on esoteric but increasingly influential trading strategies pioneered by hedge funds like Bridgewater.
Hedge fund performance has benefited from broken capital markets rigged by the Fed. Thesecasino gamblers bought every one of the 30 identifiable dips in the SPX since the March 2009 low, confident that the Fed would intervene to keep the stock averages rising. A few ten thousand punters have made trillions in return for little economic value added.
Bridgewater profited by buying more stocks when prices were rising and equity volatility was falling, and more bonds when prices were dipping and equity volatility was rising as investors retreated to fixed income securities. Pumping out volatility and milking the market on alternating strokes is only possible when the regularity of market waves are unnatural, engineered by a Fed held hostage to the casino gamblers. However, bond prices in August did not rise like they were supposed to when the stock market dropped 12%, so Bridgewater’s entire profits for the year were wiped out in a few days. Bridgewater now pleads for QE4, while Goldman Sachs said the latest jobs report calls for no rate increase in September, despite the failure of 80 months of ZIRP.
China’s 20-yr long, $4 trillion cumulative bids for US treasuries and DM fixed income securities has now become “offers”, and which will prove to be one of the great financial pivots of history. China bought US debt to peg the RMB exchange rate and keep its exports humming, but eventually was forced to let the RMB slowly rise against the dollar, drastically accelerating global fund inflows into the Chinese economy. Deng’s naivete unleashed a credit monster that sucked in capital and resources from all over the globe into a domestic spending boom that was inherently unstable. To prevent the RMB exchange rate from plunging and inciting even more capital flight, the PBOC has now shifted into reverse in a large, sustained and strategic way.
If the market holds above next week’s retest of the SPX 1967 low, the Fed will likely announce a “one and done” move in September, and if the market does not hold this low, then the Fed will defer its rate rise: both outcomes will cause a short-lived, half-hearted rally, but not another leg higher in the phony bull market because the global “dollar short” is unwinding and China’s house of cards is cratering, causing economies to plunge throughout the China supply chain.
Read the full article at http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/why-hedge-fund-hot-shots-finally-got-hammered/?utm_source=wysija&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mailing+List+Sunday+10+AM
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