What Bubble? China's Analysts More Bullish Than Ever

This feels more and more like a deja vu.....But with so much liquidity tied to the yuan this can easily go on for much longer than we might think. From a fundamental and investor sentiment point of view this market looks as a beautiful short. But with all the liquidity it is way too dangerous.

Hat außer mir noch jemand das gefühl eines Deja Vu´s....? Dank der unfassbaren Liquidität die an den Yuan gekoppelt ist kann das noch ne ganze Weile anhalten. Fundamental und auch von der aktuellen pychologischen Sichtweise riecht das ganze nach einem wunderbaren Shortkandidaten. Dank der irren Liquidität ist das Ganze aber zu gefährlich.

June 26 (Bloomberg) -- Zhang Shibao covers 12 Chinese stocks and recommends investors buy all of them, even after they've more than tripled on average in the past year.

``We are still in the middle of the bull market and the uptrend is irreversible,'' said Zhang, a steel analyst at China Merchants Securities Co. in Shenzhen.

Analysts who cover Chinese companies, such as Zhang, are the most bullish they've been at any time in the past 10 years. Total buy calls on mainland shares from local and foreign analysts rose to 67.4 percent of all ratings this month, the highest since Bloomberg began collating the data a decade ago. The bullishness comes as the government is trying to cool a rally that's made shares there the most expensive in Asia.
> Time for http://www.wallstreetfollies.com/ to start a Chinese site

Zhang has eight ``strong buy'' and four ``buy'' recommendations on the dozen iron and steel stocks he covers. They have gained an average 218 percent over the past 12 months and are up 97 percent this year, according to Bloomberg calculations.

Shares of Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel Co., China's biggest maker of the corrosion-resistant metal, have leapt 355 percent over the past year, while Wuhan Iron & Steel Co., the nation's third-biggest steelmaker by market value, have almost quadrupled. Nine of 10 analysts who cover Shanxi Tiagang rate it a buy, while 10 of 18 recommend buying Wuhan Iron & Steel, according to Bloomberg data. Zhang has ``strong buy'' ratings on both stocks.

CHINA produced 34% of the world's steel in 2006, while consuming only 30.9% of it

> Should be great news for margins and stock prices when supply is exceeding demand.....

> Müssen wirklich tolle perspektiven sein wenn das Angebot neurdings die Nachfrage übersteigt.....

Sell calls make up 10.3 percent of all ratings, the lowest proportion on record, and hold ratings comprise 22.2 percent of the 12,301 recommendations on Chinese stocks tracked by Bloomberg.

`Momentum and Liquidity'
Ping Jingwei, an analyst at Shanghai Securities Co., has buy recommendations on all seven stocks he covers, betting the inflow of new investors into the market will trump the government's efforts to cool it.

``Many of the stocks are above fair value in my opinion, but I don't put out a sell call because the market is now being carried along by momentum and liquidity,'' he said. ``I may think it's worth $10 but if it's now $15 and looks set to rise further, why would I put out a sell call? What if it keeps gaining? I'd look bad and it wouldn't look good on my appraisal.''

Avoiding Controversy
Guangzhou Donghua Enterprise Co., a Guangzhou-based residential property developer, has risen 189 percent this year. Ping put out a ``buy'' recommendation on March 15. Shanghai Shimao Co., a real-estate developer that has climbed 361 percent in 2007, earned a ``buy'' call from Ping on Jan. 18.

``I haven't encountered any pressure from my company so far not to put out sell calls, but I think there will be if I do,'' said Ping, who has been a securities analyst for two years after getting his Master's Degree in Finance from Shanghai's Fudan University. ``I avoid that by skipping companies that are not worth a buy. Instead of putting out a negative report, I'll just not put out one at all.''


U.S. Bears
By contrast, analysts in the U.S. have never been so bearish. Buy ratings fell below holds as a percentage of total U.S. stock picks for the first time ever in February, and now trail 45.3 percent to 47.8 percent, according to Bloomberg data.

China doesn't allow investors to sell shares they don't own and buy them back later, a practice known as short selling. That leaves brokers more reliant on buyers for commissions.

Bear Stearns' Subprime Bath

this is on top of the must read story from Mish about Bear Stearns. make sure you read this piece about "Wall Street at work" .......

das ganze paßt perfekt zu dem großartigen post von Mish über Bear Stearns. ich empfehle dringend sich das durchzulesen. perfektes beispiel wie an der wall street gearbeitet wird

Bear Tracks & CDOs

Investors in a 10-month-old Bear Stearns (BSC) hedge fund are learning the hard way the danger of investing in risky bonds with borrowed money. The investment firm's High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, as of Apr. 30, was down a whopping 23% for the year.


The situation is so bleak that Bear Stearns' asset management group is suspending redemptions at the onetime $642 million fund—meaning investors have no choice but to sit on their losses. And that's got some hopping mad.

> "no way out "..... :-)


"At the end of the day, I'd like someone to be honest with me about what's going on," says one investor in the hedge fund, which bet heavily on bonds backed by subprime mortgages, or home loans to consumers with shaky credit histories. An investor in Europe, who didn't want to be identified, says he's been trying to get his money out of the hedge fund since February.

No Questions.
He's particularly incensed that on a June 8 conference call the fund's managers set up to discuss performance, Bear Stearns officials refused to field investors' questions. "They specifically said they weren't taking any questions," says the investor. "They didn't want to say anything."...
Swift Decline
In fact, things deteriorated rather quickly at the fund. The hedge fund got off to a good start, posting a cumulative 4.44% return over its first four months, according to a Bear Stearns investor letter. But early this year the fund's performance began to suffer as the market for subprime mortgages began to implode. Coming into April, the fund was down 4% for the year.

Then things really fell apart. In April, the hedge fund posted an 18.97% decline, according to the June 7 letter obtained by BusinessWeek. But even more shocking than that big loss: only weeks earlier, the company had said it lost just 6.5% for April, according to a May 15 letter the firm sent fund investors. It's not clear what happened in those intervening weeks to force Bear Stearns to significantly revise upward its estimated April losses. ....

> see Everquest.......

Meanwhile, the poor performance of the 10-month-old "enhanced leverage" fund is another black eye for Bear Stearns' plans to roll out an initial public offering for its Everquest Financial affiliate. The investment firm created Everquest last fall, and filed documents on May 10 to sell a stake to the public (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/11/07, "Bear Stearns' Subprime IPO").

Bear Stearns' two hedge funds then sold some of their riskiest CDO investments to the new entity. .... Nearly two-thirds of Everquest's portfolio of CDOs were purchased from two hedge funds. In return, the hedge funds got $149 million in cash and 16 million shares, valued at $400 million, in the soon-to-be public company. But even that largesse from the Everquest deal wasn't enough to overcome the fund's poor April showing.

Ted "The King Of The Close" Truitt :-)!!!!

make sure you click on the headline to see Ted "king of the close" Truitt ....

lasst euch diesen clip nicht entgehen. extraklasse!!!!! auf die überschriifdt klicken!

a must see!!!!!!!!

thanks to twist and john from http://housingdoom.com/ !!!!!

Kass: Four to Blame for the Subprime Mess

i´m glad that greenspan is alive and well and that he can/must see that his legacy is going down day by day. i´m pretty sure that when the slump is over in a few year (or longer) that his reputation as "the greatest central banker of all time" will no longer stand.

ich bin wirklich froh das greenspan das noch zu lebzeiten erleben muß. sein vermächtnis wird wohl noch auf jahre wirken. ich bin mir ziemlich sicher das nachdem die scherben irgendwann zusammengekehrt sind seine reputation als angeblich" bester zentralbänker aller zeiten" nicht länger bestand haben wird. bitte unbedingt sein reden lesen.....spätetens da dürfte der lack ab sein.....

There are four main culprits responsible for the expanding subprime debacle that threatens to upset the 'Goldlicks' scenario so many are trumpeting. I've listed them in descending order of importance -- and ranked by school grade!:

Culprit #1: Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was no smarter than a fifth grader.

Greenspan did two big things wrong.

First, the former Fed chairman took interest rates far too low and maintained those levels for far too long a period in the early 2000s, well after the stock market's bubble was pierced. (Stated simply, he panicked).

The Fed's very loose monetary policy served to encourage the new, marginal and non-traditional home buyer -- the speculator and the investor, not the dweller -- to embark on a speculative orgy in home purchases not seen in nearly a century. ...

Second, Greenpsan suggested -- at just the wrong time and at the very bottom of the interest rate cycle -- that homeowners retreat from traditional, fixed rate mortgages and turn to more creative and floating rate mortgages -- interest only, adjustable option ARMs, negative amortization, etc.

He said this in February 2004 at a Credit Union National Association 2004 Governmental Affairs Conference:

"American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage. To the degree that households are driven by fears of payment shocks but are willing to manage their own interest-rate risks, the traditional fixed-rate mortgage may be an expensive method of financing a home."

thanks to http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/

One year later Greenspan continued the same mantra and cited the social benefits of the financial industry's innovation as reflected in the proliferation of the subprime mortage market.

"A brief look back at the evolution of the consumer finance market reveals that the financial services industry has long been competitive, innovative, and resilient. Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants. Such developments are representative of the market responses that have driven the financial services industry throughout the history of our country. With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. The widespread adoption of these models has reduced the costs of evaluating the creditworthiness of borrowers, and in competitive markets cost reductions tend to be passed through to borrowers. Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly 10% of the number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just 1% or 2% in the early 1990s...(now over 20% )

We must conclude that innovation and structural change in the financial services industry has been critical in providing expanded access to credit for the vast majority of consumers, including those of limited means. Without these forces, it would have been impossible for lower-income consumers to have the degree of access to credit markets that they now have. This fact underscores the importance of our roles as policymakers, researchers, bankers, and consumer advocates in fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers. "

But even as Greenspan was taking interest rates to levels that encouraged the egregious use of mortgage debt and exhorting the opportunities in creative and variable mortgage financing, there were some smart cookies out there who recognized the risks; here are quotes from two of the smartest who warned of the danger in the mortgage market.

"When I took economics in World War II, and we were studying the Great Depression, one of the reasons given were all the interest-only loans that came due. They were an indication of an economy getting into unsound lending. Ever since then it's been a rule that when you go into interest-only loans, you're very substantially increasing the risk of default. "

-- L. William Seidman. Former Chairman of the Federel Deposit Insurance Corporation and Chairman of the Resolution Trust Corporation

Our own Robert Marcin put it even more precisely (and vividly) in his prescient warning back in mid-2005.

"If Greenspan had a clue (remember, he didn't have one in the tech bubble, or aybe he did), he would jawbone the banking industry to tighten or even strangle lending standards for residential real estate. He should not kill the entire economy to slow the real estate markets. Now that bag people can buy condos in Phoenix with no down payments, maybe the Fed should get involved. You can't expect mortgage bankers to do anything; they get paid to lend money. But like Greenspan's unwillingness to raise margin rates in 1999, I expect him to do nothing until the market declines. Then, the taxpayers will be on the hook for the stupidities of the real estate speculators. Remember, I expect a sequel to the RTC in the future. "

-- Robert Marcin, Making Money Before Housing Crumbles.

Greenspan will go untouched and will continue to give speeches at $200,000 a pop.

Culprit #2: Irrational lenders like Novastar, New Century, Fremont General, Option One, Accredited Home, OwnIt Mortgage Solutions and others were no smarter than a sixth grader.

Many of these mono-line subprime lenders grew from nothing to originating billions of dollars of mortgage loans almost overnight. Their rush to lend and helter skelter growth relied on the candor of the mortgagees and not on common sense, prudent lending or reasonable underwriting standards.

The growth in subprime-only originators was irrational, but the industry will now be rationalized and the marginal lenders will go bankrupt. And, in the fullness of time, the more diversified lenders will benefit from their demise.

Culprit #3: Wall Street was no smarter than a seventh grader.
The role of the brokerage community in the packaging, warehousing and trading of mortgage securities is immense, with about a 60% share of the mortgage financing market. After tax shelter abuses in the early 1980s, junk(y) bonds in the late 1980s, overpriced technology stocks and ludicrous IPOs and disingenuous research reports in the late 1990s, one would think that Wall Street had learned its lesson.

It has not.

Defending the indefensible -- despite the "policing" of the SEC and Gov. Spitzer's initiatives -- remains Wall Street's credo. Time and time again, the major brokerage firms exist for the purpose of selling product (stocks and bonds), not for providing objective research or for the commitment to client's profitability. The higher a market surges, the easier it is for Wall Street to peddle, and package, junk.

The magnitude of the potential gains are always too attractive and tempting particularly as product demand swells into another cycle excess, as it did in subprime. Astonishingly, even the obligatory emergency conference calls intended to persuade investors that all is well were superficial and failed to disclose the inherent conflicts that each and every multiline brokerage has.

thnaks to http://www.itulip.com/

The major brokerages will be litigated against -- again. They will pay large fines but will proceed in business until the next bubble -- which they will also capitalize on.

Culprit #4: The rating agencies were no smarter than an eighth grader.
The little-known secret in the subprime market is that the principal ratings agencies have been lax in their downgrades of subprime paper and securitizations. This should not be considered a surprise, because like their Wall Street brethren, they prosper from the rising tide of credit issuances. In doing so, like a teacher who has turned his back on a boisterous and disobedient class, those recalcitrant agencies -- Moody's, Fitch and S&P -- have ignored the erosion in credit quality and abetted the rush and market share taking of subprime lending.

According to Jim Grant's Interest Rate Observer, downgrades at Moody's were even with upgrades in 2005. In 2006, downgrades/upgrades rose slightly to 1.19 to 1; this compares to the historical downgrade/upgrade ratio of 2.5 to 1. Importantly, until downgrades are issued by the agencies, investors routinely carry their investments at cost, or par -- downgrades force investments to mark to market ... and sell.

The rating agencies will likely go unscathed because they always do.

amen!

read also

"I Hear Nothing! I Know Nothing!" from tim http://tinyurl.com/2ahvxs

"The Blame Game " from mish http://tinyurl.com/yr9q3m

click on the labels and skip the first/this one to read more