6/16/10 Midday Report: BP sets aside $20B to be used on an oily day

First of all, Money McBags would like to thank all of you for your feedback yesterday.  His inbox is currently overflowing like Whitezilla's urethra after downing three cases of Mountain Dew in ten minutes (and feel free to google "Whitezilla" on your own time, Money McBags refuses to link to it due to good taste) but he promises to try to get back to each and everyone of you.  The feedback was helpful as Money McBags learned that he does both too much analysis and not enough, the posts are both too long and too short, and the jokes both add to the analysis and detract from it.  The only thing that was universal was that his readers love the pics so Money McBags is thinking of dropping all subject matter, words, and rational thought and turning WGP into another NSFW photo site.  Anyway, Money McBags is still just short of his goal of 1MM visitors so if you all could spread the word, he will be able to continue to provide you with what you like best.

In macro news today, US housing starts declined by 10% to their lowest level since December (driven by a 17% drop in single family home building ) as the government tax credit finally disappeared like poor old Yorick did from the Danish royal court back in the day or America's global domination.  Not only did housing starts drop but they were way below analyst guesses as data and common sense apparently don't figure in to analysts' regression models (and Money McBags is anxiously awaiting the day analyst guesses regress to some fucking mean where the mean isn't "dead wrong" or "not even fucking close").  Analysts guessed housing starts would come in at 650k, which would have been down 22k from last month's 672k or down only 9k from the Commerce department's newly manipulated number from last month of 659k (though the Commerce department uses the less pointed word: "readjusted").  In actuality, new housing starts were 593k, which is the 10% drop that is being reported, but since analysts used the 672k number released last month in their models (and not the newly made up 659k number), the drop was really 13% which shows that analyst models work as well as a union member in Greece or a Rush Limbaugh marriage (but hey, maybe the 4th time will be the charm).  So by "readjusting" last month's number, the market got the bump from a better than expected number in April and now doesn't feel as bad about the drop since it's being reported as 10% and not 13%.  That is mind fucking boggling.  Money McBags has less faith in any of these numbers than Elin Nordegren has faith that Tiger Woods wasn't "sinking his putts" in only grassy holes.

But the most mind numbing thing about it all is that analysts were expecting only a 3% fucking drop.  Really?  I guess the government PUBLICLY announcing that the first time home buyers' tax credit was going away didn't make it up to the top of the ivory fucking towers on Wall Street where analysts dance their fat tails around pictures of Carl Freidrich Gauss while discussing their homoskedasticity and ignoring common fucking sense.  Look, last month was a record month for new home starts and featured a 6% increase which was the most since October 2008, so the rational person would probably start with saying this month will probably feature a 6% decline, you know, the amount of the ARTIFICIALLY INFLATED (as opposed to artificially fellated) increase last month.  And since the economy has improved by at most a Herve Vellachaize nut hair since then, why don't we start by knocking some shit off the 6%, I don't know lets call the baseline a fucking 8% decrease and then based on which way the wind is blowing, we'll move it a couple % from there.  Is that so fucking hard?  While it's an out of the ordinary least squares regression and the coefficient of determination may be less determinable than Caster Semenya's gender, it makes a fuck load more sense than whatever analysts are doing.  So here's the deal.  Money McBags isn't going to open up his excel, he isn't going to look at any data or any trends, and he's going to spend fewer than 10 seconds on this guess but he'll say next month's new housing starts will come in a 585k, a slight downtick from this month as the economy remains stagnant and those people who rushed to get the tax break the other month will still have a negative effect on the absolute number of housing starts.  Anyone want to bet if that guess is better than the econometrically arrived at bullshit spewed by the economists on the street whose PhDs are less practical than a bridge to Gravina Island?  Rant fucking over, but Wall Street analysts, it's on like Donkey Kong and this fucking Mario is going to save the princess.

In other macro news, manufacturing expanded by 1.2%, building on its .7% gain last month, and setting everyone up for a bigger drop when no one buys rebuilt inventories because they don't have fucking jobs.  Capacity utilization at manufacturing plants was up slightly and companies like Deere are seeing improvement as they said sales of utility tractors rose in the “double digits”  last month, largely due to the need to shovel all of the shit economists have been spewing about the economy.  Also, Producer prices fell .3%, or rose .2% if one uses the ridiculously derived core PPI that excludes food, energy, and intelligence.  These low prices give the Fed a longer time frame to hold rates flat and reinflate the bubble (I mean economy).

Internationally, France and Spain are increasing their austerity plans.  France has pledged to raise the retirement age by 2 years from 60 to 62 (though since they use the metric system, Money McBags believes that really translates to 29 years old), wants to raise income taxes on the rich, and will start charging fees based on the amount of armpit hair their women are sporting.  Leaks of the proposed actions have somehow caused the French to once again surrender to the Germans while praying to the great Jerry Lewis that he'll dump the MDA and adopt them as the new enfants de Jerry.  C'est dommage bitches!   Spain is also getting frisky with their workers again (though if those workers include Helen Lindes, who can blame them?).  The Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapata, who never saw a spanish name he couldn't add to his own, is seeking to spur full time hiring by employers while easing their layoff burden in order to get unemployment to drop from 20% to Spain's historic unemployment rate of 19%.  Money McBags isn't sayng the people of Spain don't work, well, actually, that's exactly what he is saying.

In stock news, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been told to delist from the stock exchange though the FHFA's acting director Edward J. DeMarco (and the J apparently stands for "just kidding") said that the action "does not constitute any reflection on either enterprise’s current performance or future direction, nor does delisting imply any other findings or determination on the part of F.H.F.A. as regulator or conservator.”  Really?  The performance of those two shitawful enterprises which has led their stock prices to drop below $1 because no one wants to fucking own them is not a "reflection of current or future performance?"  Fuck, if that's the case then markets are terribly inefficient (which they are thanks to high frequency traders) and Mr. DeMarco should sink his entire life savings into those shitrags (and Money McBags says shitrags with all due respect).  In other company news,  BP's credit default swaps are now showing a 40% chance of default which means the market is only mispricing them by 60% so if you can, there is money to be made here despite BP agreeing to put $20B in escrow to pay claims from the oil spill while somehow also creating enough new water to drain the entire Gulf and refill the whole fucking thing since they've basically ruined that natural habitat like Robin Williams ruined comedy or Simona Halep ruined her post tennis marketability (and ask Soleil Moon-Frye what losing one's Punky Brewsters can do to one's career).  In other stock news, Fed Ex is down despite a good Q thanks to a disappointing outlook casued by growing pension liabilites and increased maintenace spend needed for their aircrafts.  Now Money Mcbags doesn't want to sound overly morbid here, but why not just not fix the planes and have the older workers fly them and thus kill two birds with one stone (figuratively and literally).

In small cap news, QCOR is up another 10% despite getting the Heisman from the FDA on Friday, pushing back the decision on approving Achtar for IS for the 9 billionth time.  Money McBags has talked about this ad nauseum (though not as nauseum as Lady Gaga's face, or her music) and he likes the company, especially with the potential for the NS market, but the stock is starting to get overvalued here.  Money McBags only has them earning $.60 next year and their gross sales were actually a bit disappointing this last Q.  Net sales had been running at ~68% of gross sales and this last Q they were 78% and Money McBags still hasn't heard why that was other than perhaps their reimbursement issues with Tricare were fixed.  The point is, Money McBags thinks this Q coming up will disappoint and you will get a better opportunity to buy this in a couple of months.  That said, the CEO has done a nice job turning this company around and pointing them in the right direction.  Finally, keep your eyes open for WGO's earnings report tomorrow to see if their core business can break even and how much cash from operations they burn.  They might have one more decent manipulatedly good quarter, but this stock is looking at a bigger uphill climb than Stedman Graham has to take on "couples night."