Why A 100bps ECB Rate Cut Would Crush European Banks

Last week, when observing the ongoing drop  in both Wells Fargo's Net Interest Margin...

... as well as the broad decline in Net Interest Income across all US banks as rates continue to drop...

... we warned that this is an early warning of just how the upcoming Fed rate cuts will cripple US banks.

But if US banks are about to get hit, then European banks, which are already in purgatory courtesy of five years of negative rates coupled with both public and private QE, may enter the 9th circle of hell as soon as Thursday, when the ECB previews what may be a 20bps rate cut in September with or without more QE.

While the disastrous performance of European bank stocks since the financial crisis has been extensively discussed, with the European banking sector trading on the edge of support, beyond which nothing good awaits...

... it would be ironic if it is none other than the ECB which tips European bank stocks to new all time lows.

The reason for that is that, as Goldman recently calculated, further rate cuts are "a very uncomfortable prospect" for the sector, and an indicative -20bps rate cut could lead to an aggregate €5.6bn (-6%) profit cut for the 32 Euro banks under Goldman coverage, with 12 banks facing an >10% EPS cut, and 5 banks >20%. Worse, if Draghi were "forced" to cut rates further still, by say -100bp, one quarter of European banks would turn loss making or break-even, and 75% would not meet their cost of capital, according to Goldman calculations.

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Morgan Stanley Is Wrong: Goldman Warns China's Credit Impulse Collapse Will "Drag On Growth" This Year

Just over a month ago - in what seemed to be an effort to keep the dream of a global synchronous recovery narrative alive - Morgan Stanley attempted to show that the link between China's (declining) credit impulse and the global economy (which we are constantly told is ebullient) has now been severed and all is well in the world.

Their Chief Asia Economist Chetan Ahya began by confirming that "if you had been able to reliably pick the key global macro variable over 2012-16, China’s credit impulse would have been your choice" and explains why (this should be obvious to regular readers): 

The incredibly tight link between the credit impulse and China’s growth cycle, emerging markets (EMs) exports, global growth and commodity prices meant that it would have accurately predicted the direction of almost all other global macro variables that mattered, with about six months’ lead time.

He further explains the "simple" - in retrospect of course - reason behind this observation:

China’s credit impulse – or its leverage cycle – was the only game in town back then. With global aggregate demand weak as developed markets (DMs) were deleveraging and EMs were adjusting, the change in China’s credit impulse was the most significant driver of the global economy

However, in a striking claim which breaks with precedent and which, if correct suggests a historic change in the relationship between China's credit creation and its impact on global markets and economies, the Morgan Stanley economist then writes that the link between China's credit impulse and the global economy "has now been broken" and justifies his answer as follows: 

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Gold Production On The Cusp Of Peaking

Gold is valuable because it is a finite resource. What happens when all available gold is mined and processed? There is still abundant gold deep within the earth, but it has not yet been found. Mining companies are unable, to dig deep enough. It is difficult for them to know where to locate this deep gold. All known locations have been depleting for years.

That is the reason mining gold has become more difficult and output is expected to begin decreasing steadily. The precious metal is becoming harder to find.

Most of the world’s gold was mined before the 1848 Gold Rush era. Since 1950, 125,000 tons of gold has been processed, which is approximately two-thirds of all gold ever mined. All of the gold that could be accessed easily has been mined.

Gold cannot be manufactured or created. It can only be mined from the earth’s crust. If we want more gold, companies, and investors will need to begin allocating more capital to exploration companies.

According Eugene King of Goldman Sachs, known mineable gold reserve may be gone in 20 years. The definitive word here is “known.” Gold mining companies are gearing up for a new era of exploration deeper below the surface than ever before. This means these companies will be incurring new costs at the same time their profits are decreasing. That is the reason why so few new mines are being excavated and few new projects are being started.

The earth’s easy-to-find gold has already been found and mined. There will not be another California Gold Rush. The search for new gold becomes increasingly challenging and expensive each year. Outdated equipment and technology need to be replaced.

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Stockman Celebrates The End Of The Goldman Sachs Regency At The White House

The financial commentariat and the robo-machines are all in a tizzy this morning because Gary Cohn up and quit. But we say good riddance: The man gave Trump bad advice on nearly every single issue---trade, taxes, fiscal policy and the Fed.

We didn't make any bones about that viewpoint during our appearance on Fox Business this AM. When Maria Bartiromo asked us about Cohn's departure, our reply was: Hallelujah, the Goldman Sachs Regency in the White House is finally over!

The fact is, we do have a trade crisis, but Gary Cohn and the Wall Street pseudo-free traders don't care and never have. That's because they fiercely support a perverted, self-serving monetary regime that systematically and massively inflates financial assets, even as it strip mines and deflates the main street economy.

As we have been pointing out in this series, there is a perverse symbiosis between the Fed and the Dirty Float central banks of the 10 major countries (China, Vietnam, Mexico, Japan, etc), which account for 90% of the nation's $810 billion trade deficit (2017). Together they have ripped the guts out of the US industrial economy---effectively sending jobs and production abroad and cash flow and liquidated capital to Wall Street.

For its part, the Fed has monkey-hammered US competitiveness. That's the result of its insensible 2.00% inflation policy, which has fatally inflated nominal dollar wages in a world market drowning in cheap labor priced in artificially under-valued currencies.

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Here's Why Banks Hate Cryptocurrencies

Banks like to pretend that they're so much more established and secure than the world of cryptocurrencies, but as anybody who pays close attention to the headlines would know...that's just not the case...

Setting aside all of their rhetoric about embracing the blockchain, banks have mostly avoided or opposed cryptos (Goldman Sachs, sensing the opportunity for profit, is one notable exception), often citing their volatility and the ease with which they can be used to launder money as qualities that disqualify them from being taken seriously (though, as we recently witnessed with the US dollar, perhaps banks need to rework this volatility argument a bit).  Even yesterday's announcement of the first criminal charges against a cryptocurrency trader pales in comparison to the many, many crimes that banks (or even one bank) have settled allegations of. The real answer to why the banks’ dislike cryptocurrencies is probably because they feel threatened. The recent selloff notwithstanding, the rise of cryptocurrencies has continued unabated, despite the efforts of some of the most powerful governments on Earth, while the concept is still very young, it does have potential to shake up the aging fiat system. In order to understand the race between the banks and cryptocurrencies, we developed a visual to see just how "David" is comparing to "Goliath."

Using data from Yahoo Finance and CoinMarketCap.comhttps://howmuch.net/articles/banks-vs-cryptocurrencies, HowMuch.com's data team developed a visual that compares the market caps between some of the world’s largest banks and the largest cryptocurrencies. On the left blue column, there are four banks listed from largest to smallest market caps: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of China, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Conversely, the right red column features the total cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, NEO, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, and Stellar. The larger the circle, the bigger the market cap.

After an extraordinarily volatile (even for bitcoin) start to the year, cryptocurrencies are rallying once again, with bitcoin breaking above $10,000. As of Feb. 16, 2018, the crypto market had a market cap of $470 billion - larger than the size of the United States’ largest bank, JPMorgan Chase.

Bitcoin's market cap alone is comparable to Bank of China's. The second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum, is comparable in size to Morgan Stanley. It is stats like these that have the global banking sector worried that cryptocurrencies are on track to make a serious impact on their operations.

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Goldman's Shocking Capitulation: The Buy-The-Dip Era Is Dead, "This Is A Genuine Regime Change"

Earlier today, we were delighted to report that after the biggest vol explosion in history, the world's largest hedge fund Bridgewater, went from urging traders to go all in as recently as January 23, to warning that a "bigger shakeout is coming."

It turns out that Ray Dalio wasn't the only fund to urge its broader client universe - and anyone else who cared to listen - to do one thing, while telling a select group of clients to do the opposite. As we noted on Saturday, in his latest Weekly Kickstat published on Friday, Goldman's chief equity strategist David Kostin essentially told clients to BTFD, suggesting that the correction was likely almost over, based on historical patterns.

Meanwhile, on the very same Friday, Brian Levine - co-head of global equity trading at Goldman Sachs - sent out an email to the investment bank’s bigger clients, in which he made a stunning prediction: the Buy the Dip Regime is now over.

In the email, first reported by the Financial Times, Levine writes that "Historically shocks of this magnitude find their troughs in panicky selling" and yet "I’ve been amazed at how little ‘capitulation selling’ we’ve seen on the desk . . . The ‘buy on the dip’ mentality needs to be thoroughly punished before we find the bottom."

And, more shockingly, the person in charge of the most important trading desk also said that “longer term, I do believe this is a genuine regime change, one where you sell-the-rallies rather than buy-the-dips."

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"Do I Have To Worry About Another Volatility Spike"- A Q&A With Goldman's Head Quant

After a day of conference calls with investors, Goldman's newly-hired quant Rocky Fishman has assembled the most frequently asked questions that are relevant for trading dynamics in the VIX and equities in the coming days.

Here is the result: Goldman's Q&A on the Trading Dynamics of ETPs

1. Do I have to worry about VIX ETPs driving another similar volatility spike?

Not for now, and not likely anytime soon. The large short VIX products were the primary driver of Monday afternoon's late-day acceleration in the VIX, and with them diminished ($300mm AUM now vs $3.9bln peak AUM), the quantity of VIX futures ETP issuers would have to buy on a further volatility spike is diminished as well. Levered long ETPs remain sizable ($1.1bln AUM), but per unit of VIX futures exposure, they trade less on a volatility spike than inverse products would (filling the gap between long futures that have risen and a fund NAV that has risen faster requires fewer units of futures than between a NAV and futures position that are moving in opposite directions). The higher level of VIX futures also makes an N-point move a lower percentage move than it would be with lower VIX futures prices.

2. What’s the impact of the XIV (and Japan-listed 2049) redemption? What’s the impact of the SVXY continuing to trade?

The previously sizable short VIX ETPs no longer have a significant impact on the VIX futures market because Monday's sell-off pushed their AUM down so much that their VIX futures holdings would be immaterial to the broad market (the SVXY is short less than 1% of VIX futures open interest), regardless of whether or not they continued trading.

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Goldman's Asset Arm Takes Big Hit On Venezuelan Bond Bloodbath

The fallout from the Venezuelan bond restructuring has claimed a major victim in Goldman Sachs Asset Management, or rather some of the “muppets” who trusted Goldman to invest their money. However, the route which led Goldman to losing a chunk of client money wasn’t just a case of bad judgement, being riddled with the usual mixture of greed, questionable ethics and government intervention. As we detailed in “Goldman Accused Of Funding Maduro’s Dictatorship”.

Goldman controversially purchased $2.8 billion of 2022 bonds in May 2017 in the state-owned oil producer PDVSA, for about $865 million - or about 31 cents on the dollar. This prompted Julio Borges, President of the National Assembly and head of Venezuela’s opposition, to accuse Goldman of “aiding and abetting the country’s dictatorial regime.” Borges threatened that any future democratic government would not recognise or pay on the bonds. In true Goldman fashion, however, the deal was just too lucrative to pass up, or so it seemed at the time, as Goldman paid a then 30% discount to other Venezuelan bonds with a similar maturity.

Goldman’s ”defence” was that it did not buy the bonds directly from PDVSA, consequently it did not transfer funds directly to the Venezuelan regime.

To make matters worse, when the Trump White House extended sanctions against Venezuela over the Summer, including a ban on trading Venezuelan debt, Goldman’s bonds were mysteriously exempt. As we argued here.

“the logic is that if Goldman was forced to liquidate the bonds, or worse was stuck holding them as Venezuela went bankrupt, it would take a huge hit on the nearly $3 billion notional position. As such, Goldman's advisors to Trump made it quite clear that any sanctions against Venezuela would have to be Goldman Sachs revenue neutral first and foremost. That's precisely what happened.”

We have to acknowledge, however, that the next comment of ours was only half correct.

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Goldman Sachs Maintains The Most Tax Havens Of Any US Company... By Far

Multinational companies based in the United States are able to avoid paying an estimated $100 billion in federal income tax every year through the use of tax havens.

As Statista's Niall McCarthy notes, a recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has found that 366 of America's largest 500 companies maintain 9,755 tax haven subsidiaries holding over $2.6 trillion in accumulated profits.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Despite only having three tax haven subsidiaries in Ireland, Apple stashes the most cash off shore by far, some $246 billion which helps the company avoid $76.7 billion in U.S. taxes.

The Goldman Sachs Group maintains the most tax havens of any large U.S. company by far with 905 in total. That includes 511 in the 511 in the Cayman Islands (though the company does not have an office there), 183 in Luxembourg, 52 in Ireland and 41 in Mauritius.

Morgan Stanley is in second place with 619 tax haven subsidiaries while ThermoFisher Scientific rounds off the top three with 199.

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After 16 Months Without a 5% Market Pullback, Goldman's Clients Want To Know Just One Thing

It's confusing to be a Goldman client these days.

One month after the investment bank reported that its Bear Market Risk indicator had jumped to 67%, a level it hit most recently before the dot com bubble crash and just before the global financial crisis and prompted Goldman to ask "should we be worried now"...

... Goldman's chief equity strategist, David Kostin, nearly admitted capitulation on his bearish year-end S&P price target of 2,400 (which rises to 2,600 by year end 2019, or just 25 points from current levels!), writing last week that "the 2400 target assumes no reform and P/E of 17.3x. 65% probability of passage by 1Q." However, "with tax reform, target could be 2650 (17.9x)." Even so, Kostin still conceded that both the S&P 500 and the median stock trades at high valuations (the latter at the 98%-percentile of historical records), with the exception of free cash flow yields, which he explained is artificially low due to companies' unwillingness to spend on capex.

So on one hand, there is a broad consensus that stocks are massively overvalued, there are also concerns that the market is poised for a bear market, if not worse, and all this takes place 30 years after Black Monday. On the other however, Goldman refuses to cut its tactical outlook on stocks, and despite predicting a 6% drop by year end, cautions that stock may keep rising, if only on expectations of tax reform getting done, which will push stocks even higher, to 2,650 or more.

In this context, it is probably not surprising then that as Goldman's David Kostin writes in his latest Weekly Kickstart report that "In the ninth year of economic expansion, with S&P 500 up 15% YTD, the most common question from clients is, “When will the rally end?”

Here are the details from the latest round of conversations Goldman had with its clients, which it summarizes as "peak growth and drawdown potential."

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What Goldbugs Have Been Waiting For: Goldman’s New Primer On Gold

The good news is that Goldman believes “precious metals remain a relevant asset class in modern portfolios, despite their lack of yield” and disagrees with Ben Bernanke and the naysayers “They are neither a historic accident or a relic. Indeed, by looking at each of the physical properties of an ideal long-term store of value…we can clearly see why precious metals were initially adopted and why they remain relevant today.”

It was sounding really good – and there was 91 pages to go - although when it came to the drivers of precious metal prices, Goldman did not exactly re-invent the wheel “We see two key drivers of the precious metals markets: Fear and Wealth”

That said, there was a new take on what, in Goldman's eyes constitutes fear as “in our new framework we see a closer link to growth expectations. However, we ?nd that many risk factors are relevant, depending on the sub-component of gold demand: real interest rates, debasement risks, sovereign balance sheet risks, geopolitical risks and other market tail-risks. Stated more simply, we are talking about the drivers of “risk-on”/”risk-off” behavior in markets.”

On the wealth angle, the good news for gold was that “as economies grow, they tend to go through a rapid gold accumulation phase at around per capita GDP of $20,000-$30,000, following a ‘hump-shaped’ relationship between per capita income and gold demand. As more EM economies (including China) are set to grow to these income levels over the next few decades.” 

As in-depth students of gold market research, our mood was lifted by some genuinely original research. Goldman found that the ratio between gold purchases and household savings (global we assume) has been broadly stable at around 1.7% for almost 40 years. Who knew that.

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Goldman Is Allowing Its Clients To Bet On The Next Financial Crisis

Just over a decade ago, as the S&P was hitting all time highs and there was a line around the block of 30-some year old hedge fund managers, desperate to put other people's money in various ultra risky investments just so they could pick a few excess bps of yield over Treasurys - a situation painfully familiar to what is going on now - Goldman had an epiphany: create new synthetic products that have huge convexity, i.e., provide little upside (such as a few basis points pick up in yield) versus unlimited downside, link them to the shittiest assets possible and sell them to gullible, yield-chasing idiots (collecting a transaction fee) while taking the other side of the trade (collecting a huge profit once everything crashes). The instruments, of course, were CDOs, and not long after Goldman sold a whole of them, the financial system crashed and needed a multi-trillion bailout from which the world has not recovered since.

Ten years later, Goldman is doing it again, only instead of targeting subprime mortgages, this time the bank has focused on quasi-insolvent European banks.

And just like right before the last financial crash, Goldman is once again allowing its clients to profit from the upcoming collapse, or as Bloomberg puts it, "less than a decade after the last major banking crisis, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan  are offering investors a new way to bet on the next one."

The trade in question is a total return swap, a highly levered product which is similar or a credit default swap but has some nuanced differences, which targets what are known as Tier 1 , or AT1 or "buffer" notes issued by European banks, and which usually are the first to get wiped out when there is even a modest insolvency event (just ask Banco Popular), let alone a full blown financial crisis.

Goldman and JPM are offering the derivative trades that enable investors to bet on or against high-risk bank bonds that financial regulators can wipe out if a lender runs into trouble. Other banks are also hoping to get in on the fun, and start making markets in the contracts, known as total-return swaps, or TRS, in the coming weeks, according to Max Ruscher, the London-based director of credit indexes at IHS Markit Ltd., which administers the benchmarks that the swaps are linked to.

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Goldman Sachs Says That There Is A 99 Percent Chance That Stock Prices Will Not Keep Going Up Like This

Analysts at Goldman Sachs are saying that it is next to impossible for stock prices to keep going up like they have been recently.  Ever since Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in November, stocks have been on a tremendous run, but this surge has not been matched by a turnaround in the real economy.  We have essentially had a “no growth” economy for most of the past decade, and ominous signs pointing to big trouble ahead are all around us.  The only reason why stocks have been able to perform so well is due to unprecedented intervention by global central banks, but they are not going to be able to keep inflating this bubble forever.  At some point this absolutely enormous bubble will burst and investors will lose trillions of dollars.

The only other times we have seen stock valuations at these levels were just before the stock market crash of 1929 and just before the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.  For those that think that they can jump into the markets now and make a lot of money from rapidly rising stock prices, I think that it would be wise to consider what analysts at Goldman Sachs are telling us.  The following is from a CNBC article that was published on Monday…

Investors may be in for disappointing market returns in the decade to come with valuations at levels this high, if history is any indication.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs pointed out that annualized returns on the S&P 500 10 years out were in the single digits or negative 99 percent of the time when starting with valuations at current levels.

Do you really want to try to fight those odds?

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Goldman: The Fed Will Hike But Here Are "The Two Most Interesting Questions"

Today the FOMC will hike rates by another 25 bps - an event which the Fed Funds market prices in with near virtual certainty, while Goldman calls the rate increase "extremely likely" - and only a "tail" event like an extremely weak CPI report hours ahead of the Fed announcement, has any chance of preventing  this outcome. So with the next rate hike virtually inevitable, questions are focused on not only the Fed's exit strategy for balance sheet normalization and what the "dots" or funds rate path will look like, but how the Fed squares rising rates with the recent string of inflation misses.

As Goldman's Jan Hatzius writes, data since the March meeting has sharpened the dilemma that both sides of the mandate are sending increasingly different signals about the urgency of further tightening. "The unemployment rate has fallen 0.4pp since the March meeting and our current activity indicator and real GDP estimates signal that above-trend output growth will produce further labor market improvement. But the year-over-year core PCE inflation is now 0.2pp lower than at the March meeting."

While conceding that a hike is guaranteed, Goldman notes that two issues should make this meeting particularly interesting.

First, will Fed officials alter their policy views in response to the increasingly different signals that both sides of the mandate are sending about the urgency of further tightening?

Second, will the press conference provide some clarity on what the next tightening step following the June hike will be?

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Goldman Pours Cold Water On Trump's Fiscal Stimulus Plan

Goldman Sachs' Chief US Political Economist Alec Phillips writes that tax reform faces a risk of failure, but tax cuts remain likely... in 2018 and investors need to stay realistic about the impact of fiscal stimulus.

President Trump’s campaign proposals initially raised expectations of several forms of fiscal stimulus, driving investor optimism on both infrastructure spending and various elements of tax reform. However, we expect only tax cuts to have a meaningful effect on growth over the next couple of years. Three risks are behind this view: tax reform failure, fiscal constraints, and delayed enactment.

Debates, delays, distractions

First, tax reform faces a real risk of failure. If Republicans pursue revenue-neutral tax reform, they are likely to encounter the same challenges they encountered in passing their health legislation. Inclusion of controversial proposals like the border-adjusted tax (BAT) or even the repeal of corporate interest expense deductibility, for example, could sink the effort. Views on these issues do not follow traditional party lines, which could easily lead to some Republican opposition (we have already seen significant opposition to the BAT, for example). With few if any Democratic lawmakers likely to vote for the tax bill, Republicans would need nearly unanimous support from their own party. Thus, while revenue-neutral tax reform might be preferable from a policy perspective, imposing this restriction would lower the odds of enactment by next year.

In light of the challenges tax reform faces, we believe that President Trump, who did not emphasize revenue-neutrality during the campaign, is likely to eventually endorse more limited reforms that result in a net tax cut. However, the size of such a cut would be limited by fiscal constraints; centrist Republican lawmakers seem especially likely to balk at large tax cuts that would eventually require deep spending cuts to maintain fiscal sustainability. Dynamic scoring and other budget accounting strategies might provide several hundred billion dollars’ worth of room for a tax cut in 10-year budget projections, but alone would allow for only a very modest cut. Our current expectation is a tax cut of $1.75tn over ten years, taking effect in 2018.

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"This Is Not The Reaction The Fed Wanted": Goldman Warns Yellen Has Lost Control Of The Market

With stocks soaring briskly around the globe following Yellen's "dovish" hike, and futures set for a sharply higher open with the Nasdaq approaching 6,000, something surprising caught our attention: in a note by Goldman's Jan Hatzius, the chief economist warns that the market is overinterpreting the Fed's statement, and Yellen's presser, and cautions that it was not meant to be the "dovish surprise" the market took it to be.

Specifically, he says that while the FOMC delivered the expected 25bp hike, with only minor changes to its projections. "surprisingly, financial markets took the meeting as a large dovish surprise—the third-largest at an FOMC meeting since 2000 outside the financial crisis, based on the co-movement of different asset prices."

Even more surprisng is that according to Goldman, its financial conditions index, "eased sharply, by the equivalent of almost one full cut in the federal funds rate."

In other words, the Fed's 0.25% rate hike had the same effect as a 0.25% race cut!

The implication from the market's reaction is that at current levels, financial conditions are poised to make a substantial positive contribution to growth in 2017, from a starting point of essentially full employment, inflation close to the target, and a sub-1% funds rate; which in light of concerns about an economic overheating due to Trump's fiscal policies is precisely the opposite of what Yellen wants. Hatzius warns that "the FOMC will lean against this, and will deliver more monetary tightening than discounted in the bond market."

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Goldman Stunned By Collapse In Gasoline Demand: "This Would Require A US Recession"

While energy traders remain focused on weekly changes in crude supply and demand, manifesting in shifts in inventory of which today's API  data, which showed the second biggest inventory build in history, was a breathtaking example of how OPEC's "production cut" is clearly not working, a much more troubling datapoint was revealed by the Energy Information Administration last week when it reported implied gasoline demand.

To be sure, surging gasoline supply and inventories are hardly surprising or new: they remain a byproduct of the unprecedented global crude inventories leftover from two years of failed OPEC policy which resulted in a historic glut. Last January, overall crude runs were up 500,000 bpd as refiners shifted away from diesel and other products to gasoline to chase more attractive margins amid a mild winter and sluggish diesel demand. The move led to an overbuild of gasoline stocks that lingered into the summer, punishing margins when they should have been at their strongest. This January, crude runs are at historic levels, up by roughly 300,000 bpd over last year.

So yes, both gasoline stocks and supply remains at extremely high levels, but what set off alarm bells is not supply, but demand: the EIA last week reported that the 4-week average of gasoline supplied - or implied gasoline demand - in the United States was 8.2 million barrels per day, the lowest since February 2012. And, as Reuters adds, U.S. refiners are now facing the prospects of weakening gasoline demand for the first time in five years.

Unlike excess supply, which may have numerous factors, when it comes to a plunge in end product demand the implication can be only one: the US consumer is very ill, especially when considering that gasoline use has grown every year since 2012, despite fears that demand has topped out amid the growth of fuel efficient cars, urbanization and a graying population.

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Trump Picks Former Goldman Banker Steven Mnuchin As Treasury Secretary

While it has yet to be officially confirmed by the Trump transition team, moments ago the NYT reported that - in what had previously been leaked on several occasions on various other outlets most notably the WSJ - former Goldman banker and Soros employee, Steven Mnuchin "a financier with deep roots on Wall Street and in Hollywood but no government experience" is expected to be named Donald J. Trump’s Treasury secretary as soon as Wednesday.

The WSJ has confirmed as much, reporting that "President-elect Donald Trump will name longtime banker and former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as Treasury secretary, turning to a campaign loyalist and fundraiser for the incoming administration’s top economic cabinet post, a transition official said Tuesday."

As the WSJ adds, "Mr. Mnuchin’s Wall Street pedigree presents a contrast with the populist themes Mr. Trump struck in his campaign, railing against big banks and vowing to close tax loopholes that benefit hedge funds. Mr. Trump also repeatedly attacked his rivals in the primary and general elections for their Wall Street ties, especially those connected to Goldman Sachs."

If confirmed by the Senate as Treasury secretary, Mr. Mnuchin will join a list of prominent bankers who made similar moves from Wall Street to Washington, including two of his former bosses at Goldman, Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin, who were both top Goldman executives before running Treasury.

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Goldman Bans Partners From Donating To Trump Campaign To "Minimize Potential Reputational Damage"

In the last days of August, Goldman Sachs surprised its employees with a new rule: the firm's top employees will be barred from donating to certain political campaigns, including that of Trump-Pence.

In a memo sent out on August 29, the firm's global compliance office said that starting on September 1, "all partners across the firm are considered “Restricted Persons” as defined by the firm’s Policy on Personal Political Activities in the US." This means that as of this moment, Goldman's partners are "prohibited from engaging in political activities and/or making campaign contributions to candidates running for state and local offices, as well as sitting state and local officials running for federal office", and specifically donating to the Donald Trump campaign, in order to "minimize potential reputational damage."

The memo conveniently provides the following example of the type of political activity that is barred, among others:

Any federal candidate who is a sitting state or local official (e.g., governor running for president or vice president, such as the Trump/Pence ticket, or mayor running for Congress), including their Political Action Committees (PACs).

As Fortune, which first obtained the memo reported, said that Goldman's new rule was meant to remove any implication of so-called “pay to play.” Four years ago Goldman bank paid $12 million to settle charges that a former Boston-based banker had picked up bond underwriting business in the state while working for and contributing funds to the campaign of a then Massachusetts state treasurer and governor-hopeful, Tim Cahill.

Pay-to-play rules were first introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010, after several investment advisors were accused of trying to win business, such as managing public pensions, with improper tactics including political contributions. If a financial advisor were to make a campaign contribution to a public official or candidate, they would be banned from providing advisory services for compensation to the government client for two years under the rules.

Goldman explains that "the policy change is also meant to minimize potential reputational damage caused by any false perception that the firm is attempting to circumvent pay-to-play rules, particularly given partners’ seniority and visibility," adding that “all failures to pre-clear political activities as outlined below are taken seriously and violations may result in disciplinary action."

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This Is What The Unprecedented Chinese M&A Scramble In America Looks Like

The raging need for Chinese oligarchs and corporations to park their cash offshore, and as far away as possible from the the mainland and the risk of sudden, sharp (10%-15%) devaluation, has resulted in not only an epic Vancouver housing bubble, or the predicted parabolic surge in bitcoin price (which has soared by 50% in just a few weeks), but an unprecedented M&A spree for US-based assets. We profiled as much in late March in a post titled "Eight Things The Chinese Are Scrambling To Buy In America."

And while overall M&A in the US is down substantially YTD, sliding 28% by volume (but only 4% in number of deals) mostly as a result of the volatile market in the early part of the year as well as the chilling effect of Congressional crackdown on tax-inversion deals (such as the pulled Pfizer-Allergan mega-merger), and the lack of any blockbuster mega-cap (>$25 billion) deals, China not only refuses to go away, but the level of Chinese cross-border M&A chasing after US targets is literally off the charts.

Here are the details from Goldman:

Cross-border, while down in aggregate, continues to gain share at 34% of total YTD volumes (a 6-year high). While the distribution of acquirers and targets remains relatively well diversified, one trend has been increased Chinese volumes. Notably, China has accounted for 26% of global cross-border activity YTD, which is nearly 3x higher than the next highest year (2013).

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