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Category: 1 – Liquidity Trader- Money Trends

How Fed and Treasury policy, Primary Dealers, real time Federal tax collections, foreign central banks, US banking system, and other factors that affect market liquidity, interact to drive the financial markets. Focus on trend direction of US bonds and stocks. Resulting market strategy and tactical ideas. 4-5 in depth reports each month. Click here to subscribe. 90 day risk free trial!

Stimmy Gonna Leave Its Mark… In Bond Trader’s Underwear

Lee Adler

Back on February 5th, I wrote in this report:

The withholding data strongly suggests that more stimulus isn’t needed. As vaccine distribution widens, the economy should heat up on its own. Any additional government juice will heat it up even more.

What the unintended consequences of that will be, we can only guess. Here’s one guess. Institutional balanced fund managers will dump Treasuries and buy stocks.

That will first lead to a blowoff in stocks, which seems to be underway now. But a collapse in the bond markets that’s not offset with equal profits for Primary Dealers from stocks, could lead to a crash in stocks too.

I repeated that message in early March based on the February tax data.

So we knew very well that blockbuster jobs numbers were coming. The BLS (Bureau of Liar Statistics) may lie sometimes, but the tax data doesn’t. All you need to do is look at it. Wall Street eConomists can’t be bothered.

The US Treasury is kind enough to report its tax collections to us EVERY SINGLE DAY, one day after it is collected and counted. Who could ask for better data than that? Pure, raw, unmanipulated, hard data, that not a single Wall Street, or academic, eConomist pays any attention to.

Instead, they watch the heavily manipulated, after the fact, subsequently massively revised, government economic data. Then they spin it to fit their narrative. Wall Street has something to sell you. Academic eConomists are either selling, acting as paid shills, or are simply on ego trips.

There are a handful of good ones out there, and some who are doing serious research, I guess. We don’t hear about them. But the ones who show up repeatedly in the Wall Street media are shills often getting paid to represent a certain political or business point of view.

Conversely, we focus on the hard data. No interpretation needed. It is what it is. Compare this year with the same period last year. Put it on a chart or two. See how that comparison is moving along month to month. And you know EXACTLY what the economy is doing in real time without having to guess what some lying liar eConomist is trying to sell you.

In March, withholding taxes rose at the same rate as in February, which was very, very strong. I show you the trends via a nice chart and a couple of tables in this report, and I tell you what it means for the Treasury market, and what it implies for stocks.

And that is that we are headed for a big cliff. Enjoy the party while it lasts. I’ll tell you when we’re near the cliff.

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Animal Spirits are Waning and Money is Disappearing

Lee Adler

In past reports I’ve covered the fact that the proximate cause of the US Treasury’s massive intervention in the Treasury market is the crash in Treasury bond prices and not yields. Dealers are underwater. They’re drowning. And surprise, surprise, they have engaged in more stupid behavior of the kind that causes systemic crashes.

Why are we surprised?  These same Wall Street Mafiosi are behind every financial crash, and they are never held responsible. Quite the contrary, the Fed bails them out and rewards them for their disgusting, criminal malfeasance and wild gambling with other people’s money.

The financial system with the Fed as corrupt cop on the beat, stinks to high hell, but it is what it is. We just have to understand their corrupt rules and play by them in order to preserve and grow our capital. Understanding that game meant that we’ve had to be bullish most of the time for the past dozen years.

Sad.

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Going Going Gone- We Now Know When The Party Will End

Lee Adler

On February 23, the US Treasury pumped $55 billion in cash into the accounts of Primary Dealers, banks, money market funds, and other institutions who had held the T-bills that were expiring that day. These redemptions began the US Treasury’s series of massive, twice weekly paydowns of the US government’s short term debt.

The purpose of the paydowns was twofold. First, the Treasury is required by the current budget law to whittle down its cash from a peak of $1.8 trillion last year, to $133 billion by August.  Treasury Minister Janet opted to start the process by paying down existing short term debt.

That accomplished the second goal, which was to force holders of the expiring paper to buy longer term debt. Despite their protestations that all is well, economic policy makers know that the crash in Treasury note and bond prices is causing a crisis in the Primary Dealer system.

Minister Janet works very closely with Lord Jaysus of the Fed, of course. They expected that the T-bill paydowns would help to reverse the decline in the prices of Treasury notes and bonds by forcing cash into the accounts of dealers and investors. It didn’t work. At least not to the extent that they needed. The full report is reserved for subscribers. 

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Non-subscribers, there’s more for you too! So read on!

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Bank Deposits Chart and Data Correction

Lee Adler

In the March 21 report on bank deposits I mistakenly posted an old chart from January. Here is the correct chart through March 10 on deposits and through March 17 on the Fed’s SOMA, along with an update on the impact of the correction on the analysis and conclusions.

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This Trend of Bank Deposits Should Scare the Hell Out of You

Lee Adler

First, I want to repeat something I wrote in January:

1/18/21 A while ago I made the huge call that the stock market would follow the bond market in crashing, because Primary Dealers were overloaded with long inventory and overleveraged in financing it. I set a line in the sand of 1% on the 10 year. Last month, they crossed that. Stocks are still going up.

My technical analysis, based on the Cyclical Analysis techniques that JM Hurst published in 1970, first forecast an ultimate price target of 3900 on the S&P 500 on July 26, 2020. Three months later that projection rose to 3900-4000, and just a few weeks ago, the latest revision pointed to 4300-4400.

I don’t think it will get there, but what I think does not matter. I will follow the trend indicators until a clear sign that the fever has broken. I acquiesce in the knowledge that there’s dark matter and energy in the financial universe that I can’t see and don’t understand.

The visible part of the financial universe that I can see and of which I have some grasp, tells me that the system is fragile, that it could crash, and that the risk of such a destabilization is as great now as it ever has been.  

Again, I wrote that, two months ago.  So now what?

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The Day of Reckoning Is Upon Us

Lee Adler

Stock buybacks have been widely reported as being responsible for much of the bull market. That is undoubtedly true. Buybacks reduce the supply of equities, and put cash back in the pockets of sellers. That cash burns a hole in their pockets, stimulating their demand for the reduced supply of equities that remains on the market.

Of course, that ignores the cause. Free money from the Fed promotes these corporate C-suite financial engineering scams. Executives get to issue ridiculous stock option grants to themselves, then they have their corporation do stock buybacks to push up the value of their options. They can then sell into the rallies that result. Nice work if you can get it.

I have warned for several years that such stock retirements are a two way street, that when prices get high, companies will reverse course and start issuing more stock. That is starting to happen.

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Fed and US Treasury Are Ensuring that Macro Liquidity Stays Bullish

Lee Adler

What else is new?

Tomorrow, the Fed talks. But Fed talk is cheap. The Fed wants you to think that talk – its talk – moves the markets, or keeps them stable. That’s just utter bull. You and I know that from simply tracking the data for as many years as we have. Bottom line, as always, is, money talks, and the Fed’s BS is just that.

All of the discussion and paralysis by analysis in the media is a sideshow. Mass confusion that consistently misses the point. It all boils down to one simple fact. When the Fed pumps money into the financial markets via the Primary Dealers, stock prices follow the money. Everything else that happens in the economy is tangential and irrelevant to trading.

I started tracking and charting the data that goes into this in 2002, courtesy of the NY Fed print shop. Here’s the chart that started it all. It was made famous in 2012 when Rick Santelli featured it in one of his rants on CNBC.

Many, many people have copied this in the years since I began publishing it about 17 years ago. But they all fail one basic test. Here’s what it is and why it matters. It matters so much that it could mean that the end of the financial system as we know it is at hand.

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When The Fed Doesn’t Want Us To Know How Bad It Is

Lee Adler

This is what it does. It stops publishing good data, and either substitutes no data, or shitty data.

I rely on the Fed’s weekly data in my research. I want to know what’s going on as close to real time as possible. It’s simple. As traders, we need current data, or as close to current as possible.

The Fed’s new format H6 money supply release is utterly useless. They stopped weekly publication.  As of February 23, the report now includes only monthly averages, and is released only on the 4th Tuesday of the month for the preceding month. So current data, as the average for January, is effectively Jan 15.  This is virtually useless.

When the Fed doesn’t want you to know what’s going on in near real time, this is what it does.

Fortunately, there’s a perfectly good workaround.

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Treasury’s Bond Market Rescue – Get Ready For the PONT Spread Bulge

Lee Adler

The US Treasury’s attempt to rescue the Treasury market began in mid February. It’s not going well. They’ve managed to stop the hemorrhaging. Prices have stopped falling over the past two weeks. But they haven’t turned the tide.

And that’s the problem. Primary Dealer inventories accumulated since last March are way under water. The dealers are the walking dead. If bond prices don’t rally, the Fed will have no choice but to start yield control and infinite QE, and it will need to do it soon.

The Fed must always maintain the appearance that their Primary Dealer strawmen, are alive and functioning as market makers as always. There’s no alternative. This month, the Fed and US Treasury have begun colluding to prime the pump, and they’re about to aim a firehose of liquidity at the problem.

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Infinite QE Is Coming Despite Skyrocketing Economic Growth

Lee Adler

Last month, I headlined this report, “We Don’t Need No Effin’ Stimmy.” That’s even more true now. Withholding tax collections are skyrocketing. It’s good news for the economy, but terrible news for the financial markets.

We are only days away from Infinite QE.

Here’s how we know, and why it won’t be bullish this time.

Subscribers, click here to download the report.

Available at this link for legacy Treasury subscribers.

KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW, before the Street does, read Lee Adler’s Liquidity Trader risk free for 90 days!

Act on real-time reality!

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