Spanish Banks Drop on Surprise EU Ruling, Which is Final and Binding

Spanish banks are lower today after Brussels decided Spanish banks must repay customers $4.2b — in relation to a mortgage clause.

I’m sure the good bankers in Spain did plenty to receive this slap on the wrist. But the headline of this story cannot be ignored, which is a panel of aristocrats in Brussels just passed judgement on Spain, a ruling that came as a surprise and is final and binding, meaning it cannot be appealed.

And then they wonder why the people want out of the EU.

source: Reuters

Banks will have to compensate customers for what they lost even before May 2013, when Spain’s Supreme Court declared the mortgages invalid if they had not been presented clearly. The home loans had an interest rate that could not fall below a benchmark, meaning customers lost out on the lower mortgage cost when rates dropped beneath this level.

New charges resulting from Wednesday’s European Court of Justice ruling could eat into bank earnings, which have already been eroded by record low interest rates and fierce competition for a shrunken loan pool, and encourage more mergers.

Banco Popular, the sector’s weak link and seen as a potential takeover target, faces about 330 million euros in new charges. Its shares led losses among Spanish banks and were down 6.6 percent by 1300 GMT.

The ruling also knocked shares in Banco Sabadell, Caixabank, BBVA and Liberbank — the banks most exposed to the “floor clauses,” which were introduced as a safety net during the financial crisis.

BBVA and Caixabank have said it could cost them 1.2 billion euros and 750 million euros respectively.

Most Spanish banks have removed the clauses from their mortgage products since the 2013 Spanish court ruling and already set aside money to cover compensation of around 5 billion euros that the court ruled had been incorrectly charged.

A Bank of Spain source said this could have an additional impact of “slightly more” than 4 billion euros on the country’s banks, in line with analysts’ predictions. Analysts expect an average hit of around 30 basis points on capital ratios.

The ruling, which was widely unexpected by the banks, is final and cannot be appealed, an EU court spokeswoman said.
The case first arose after several Spaniards said that banks had hidden the floor clauses in their mortgage contracts. The ECJ ruling could now open the door to 2 million others seeking repayment from banks, consumer lobby group Adicae said.

In response to the ruling, the Spanish banking association said banks were open to renegotiating with clients but they wanted more details to know how to apply the decision under Spanish law. Spain’s Socialist party called for measures so that people could recover their money as quickly as possible.

It is still unclear, however, how the banks will go about repaying customers.

Banco Sabadell, which said its mortgages were still valid as they had been presented clearly, could be liable for new charges worth 490 million euros, according to Deutsche Bank analysts.

BBVA, Spain’s second largest bank, said the ruling would knock its full-year earnings for 2016 by 404 million euros. BBVA shares were down 1.9 percent by 1300 GMT, while next largest lender Caixabank’s were down 2.5 percent smaller lender Liberbank, which in relation to its size is the most affected, is liable for 259 million euros. Banco Santander, Spain’s largest bank, was among the least impacted as it did not use mortgage floors.

I don’t expect this or the Italian banking crisis to have any last effects on stocks, not while the ECB is printing $80b per mo for QE.

There are very few companies that play a central role in people’s lives. Personally, I don’t use $NFLX all that much. I’ve been using Comcast aka Xfinity on demand for movies, Amazon prime for music — cutting out monthly iTunes purchases entirely. I used to buy about a 500 new songs per annum via Apple. Now I buy zero. In the car, I use Sirius and also have thier mobile version too.

For the site, we use google, Facebook, rackspace, Intuit, some internet telephony subscription, Alexa (owned by Amazon), PayPal, stripe, Citrix and a sundry of other small software services.

Most people that I know use Netflix. Stifel has upped the price target for the shares this morning, citing easy yoy compares and international expansion as a catalyst for the shares.

Netflix target raised to $150 at Stifel — International to take the crown in 2017 – expect sub add acceleration & crossover point

Stifel raises their NFLX tgt to $150 from $140. Netflix will enter 2017 with a dramatically deeper catalog of original content and the company faces easier y/y subscriber growth comparisons due to one-time impacts related to the co’s price un-grandfathering during 2016. Some investors are modeling Netflix’s overall net subscriber additions to be lower in 2017 than 2016, which they think is an overreaction to temporary issues the company faced during 2016. They are raising their 2017 net subscriber addition forecast by ~1.1mm and expect Netflix to add slightly more subscribers than it did during 2016, which we think is conservative given the company’s compelling content slate in 2017 and the fact that Netflix now has a full year of experience in its youngest markets

$YELP has always been my favorite internet stock, probably because I’m a foodie. But in recent years, I’ve noticed their reviews have expanded past restaurants and into things to do, a huge step into becoming God Emperor of all, the knower of everything.

YELP is one of 15 of my portfolio stocks in my GARP index held in Exodus (we’re running free trials now, click on an ad to access) and has just been named RBC’s top small cap idea for 2017 with a price target of $55.

source: Briefing

Yelp: RAQ attack! YELP is RBC’s #1 Small Cap long for ’17

RBC Capital Mkts reiterates Outperform, $55 tgt on YELP in the wake of positive results from firm’s third annual consumer survey, a deep dive into the company’s new Request A Quote offering, and Online traffic checks. Yelp remains their #1 SMID Cap Long. Firm conducted their third annual Yelp survey of more than 2,800 respondents. Key takes: 1) Yelp’s Brand Recognition Has Risen Significantly — From 66% in ’14 to practically 100% in ’16. 2) Yelp’s Usage Has Increased As Well — From 37% of U.S. ‘Net users ‘in 14 to 65% in ’16. 3) The Perceived Usefulness Of Yelp Is Rising — 76% view Yelp as useful vs. 73% in ’15. 4) Users Find Yelp Reviews More Useful And Accurate And Contribute To Them More — 50% of Yelp users have written reviews, up from 41% in ’15…signals rising engagement; 5) Yelp’s Competitive Position Vs. Google And Other Review Sites Remains Mixed

Out of all the survey data, seeing 65% of people saying the site was useful, compared to just 37% a few years ago, it speaks volumes about how well the brand is expanding. Although unable to earn a lot of money due to their insatiable desire for growth, I think YELP will be acquired in 2017 and fetch a very high premium for its amazing service.

If there’s any doubt from some of the ostriches who frequent this site, as to the relationship between Obama’s covert operations and the actual terrorists in the Middle East wreaking havoc in Syria, look no further than this UN press conference where Syria drops the names and nationalities of those caught trying to shill their way out of Aleppo.

This whole ordeal is embarrassing. America can do nothing right in the Middle East. Just get the fuck out. Save our son’s from further loss and buy the oil like good little capitalists. Also, tell the House of Saud to fight their own wars.

It's happening. Syrian forces capture US-led ISIS collaborators in Aleppo. https://t.co/yip9XhUr5f

— Deplorable Afterglow (@cybelisk) December 20, 2016

It’s unclear whether these agents/military personnel have been captured or simply outed. I’m leaning towards the latter, otherwise CNN would be going apeshit with stories of Putin personally dropping barrel bombs out of helicopters onto schoolyards with children playing handball.

Yes, I know, Russia did it. This time you’re right.

I can go a lot of ways with this material. I could trigger many of you to breathe fire over the racist MTV video that mocked and demonized white males, but what’s the point? These people are irrelevant and ineffective. They’re losing the culture wars, targeting the largest group of people (white males) in the country in a feeble attempt to make them feel like shit, and the being mocked to death for it. In this case, following the release of a video which the cucks at MTV figured would be well received, they were roundly humiliated for their lameness and outward hatred for white men — forcing them to remove the video from their infantile channel.

Remember the days when MTV only played music videos? Those were the good days.

Now they want to delve into social engineering, but their pedigrees aren’t very good and their cognitive thinking is weak– which is why they lose.

Tucker Carlson broached the subject this evening, talking about how wrong it was to label any race as bad, etc, etc. All of that is a secondary issue here when discussing the failed agitprop of the left. Bear in mind, this is a party that has shed over 900 legislative seats since 2010 and holds just 18 governorships and no meaningful leadership in both the house and senate.

The left is failing, worldwide, because they’re weak, ineffective, and intellectually lazy. We can only hope for more MTV videos of this sort, in order to expedite the pushback against establishment shills.

Because the Fed believes we’re at or near full employment, any potential fiscal stimulus will serve to boost inflation more than growth, according to Goldman. As such, they believe both credit and FX markets have read this correctly, but stock investors, the village idiots, haven’t quite grasped what this could entail.

Goldman believes the Yellen Fed will explicitly work against Trump’s fiscal stimulus in order to keep the inflation boogeyman in check. This means Yellen might raise rates more than expected, switching from the Fed put to the Yellen call, limiting the upside of the stock market — which is inherently an easing factor in monetary policy.

Source: Bloomberg

The stunning run in equities “post-Trump appears to have looked past the fact that the economy is already running close to full employment,” write analysts Charles Himmelberg and James Weldon.

This implies that any new tailwind for U.S. activity — say, from a massive fiscal stimulus — would end up boosting inflation more than growth as it would force the economy to rub up against its supply-side constraints. Economic output can only grow as much as the labor and capital available to produce it — and an aging U.S. population places a demographic damper on available man-hours of work.

“So far, the [currency] and bond markets appear to have the firmer grip on this reality,” write the Goldman pair.

The main market impacts of fiscal stimulus will be higher inflation and real interest rates, which are positive for the U.S. dollar but not necessarily so for risk assets, they argue.

This argument is further reinforced by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s apparent hawkish lurch in her press conference last week, in which she said the labor market was “in the vicinity of full employment” and threw cold water on the idea that she wants to see the economy run hot.

For the supply side, Trump’s policies are a mixed bag, per Goldman: capping immigration reduces potential growth, while deregulation and tax reform that helps spur investment could increase the U.S. economy’s top speed. The Fed, in other words, might be ready to tighten policy to serve as a monetary offset to any fiscal expansion.

For equity markets, the potential for a swifter pace of rate hikes from the central bank in the face of meaningful fiscal expansion constitutes a “contingent knock-in” trigger for the “Yellen call,” or Goldman’s theory that rallies in stock prices would elicit more tightening from the Fed Chair that would limit further upside.

“Contingent on fiscal stimulus, the FOMC will now need to respond even more aggressively to any easing of financial conditions,” conclude Himmelberg and Weldon. “The available evidence suggests to us that the long-run potential growth rates of the U.S. and global economies are still in a ‘low growth’ regime, suggesting that the equity market party will be at risk when the punchbowl goes out.”

Bear in mind, the clowns at Goldman are experts at misdirection. Nonetheless, the narrative is a logical one. Should the Fed become aggressive with rate hikes to fend off Trumpenomics, stocks will come under pressure. My sole issue with this thesis is the fact that inflation, hitherto, has been nothing less than a bedtime fairytale — something only seen in books and not so much in real life — due to the enormous debt burden placed on western economies.

Investors have short term memory issues. Plainly, 2016 was turning out to be a year of complete shit, just like 2015 and 2014, up until the point when Donald Trump got elected President.

Prove me wrong.

The environment for risk has flipped on its head since November 5th. Stocks are at record highs, higher by double digits. Commodities are through the roof and consumer sentiment has picked up — all because America elected a person that The NY Times, Washington Post and the rest of the main stream media labeled as reprehensible.

Well, well, well, it looks like the shoe is in the other foot now and the media are the one’s who’ve proven to be untrustworthy scoundrels.

If market conditions persist, 2017 should be a great year for investment banks, as yield curves widen and the IPO market becomes active again. Judging by 2016s IPO market, the worst since the financial crisis, one would think the year had been a total bust. Not true. But by the time 2016 turned out to be anything worthwhile, we were too deep into the year to open up the IPO pipeline.

The fact that investment banks managed to outperform with that sort of IPO performance is a credit to management. I still don’t think the market truly understands Trump’s disdain for China and how it will disrupt the apple cart. But at a minimum, we should see the IPO market bounce back from a horrible 2016 — bringing with it those great big investment banking fees.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in this sordid business of terrorism is that it’s good for stocks. Wall Street loves a good death count by way of terror. It ensures the military industrial complex remains relevant.

One thing of note this morning, aside from cognitive dissonance and the Berlin terrorist still on the loose, is the strong dollar — higher by about 0.5%.

The dollar index is at 2003 levels and doesn’t appear to be stalling out. There are two notable periods when the dollar ran like this, late 90s and the Reagan years, both great periods for stocks, sans the fucking crashes of 2000 and 1987.

The machines simply want Dow 20,000. There isn’t a radical Islamic terrorist in the world that can stop it.

ISIS is powerless to the intutitive algorithms that walk markets higher on a daily basis.

This week I’ll be selling my gold stocks. They were fucking retarded. I’ll be formulating a new GARP portfolio for the first half of 2017 and allocating the gold assets there.

Expect higher markets and stronger commodities, in spite of dollar virility. When I say commodities, I mainly mean crude. No one is buying gold, literally no one.

As long as the 2-10 yield curve is 130+ basis points, banks are a screaming buy. And, lastly, Santa Claus is coming. It’s hard to bet against that backdrop, while inebriated off Grandma’s eggnog.

Jim Cramer looked a little worried this evening, during his Maddening Money programme. All throughout the elections, the establishment elite, globalist shills, underestimated Trump’s desires to make America great again. With today’s electoral college win and Trump’s persistent lack of subservience to China, the shills on Wall Street are starting to wonder if it’s really happening.

It really is this time, happening that is.

In the brief clip below, Cramer summarizes what he believes to be Trump’s position on China, which plainly states we’re already in a trade war with China and Trump isn’t gonna take it anymore, God damn it.

According to Goldman Sachs, these companies have the most exposure to China.

Aside from luring blue collar’d livery drivers into their ranks in order to finance a project of autonomous cars which will one day render their employees jobless, the scourge that is Uber is also booking tremendous quarterly losses, as their insatiable greed extends without boundaries. I’ve never seen a company try to expand its footprint so rapidly, without a care in the world for the profitability of its business.

Uber is obsessed with growth and doesn’t give a shit about anything else.

For the first 9 months of 2016, they lost more than $2.2b or $8,029,000 per day. In the third quarter alone, they bled out to the tune of $800m.

However, they’re on pace to do $5.5b in sales this year — stretching its valuation to an absurd $69b, placing its price to sales ratio at 12.5x.

The details of their losses are sketchy. But we do know losses seem to be accelerating from $580m in Q1 to $800m in both Q2 and Q3. Couple this with the fact that the company has been outed for spying on its customers, and I’d prefer to never use this low, rotten, company ever again.