Thursday, April 2, 2009

SP500 failed to hold on to intraday gains

Once again sp500 is not able to decisively move up and close on high note. The down volume towards the end of the day was impressive. With sp500 near 850, the PE is about 18. That is way too richly valued under current economic climate. The hilarious move up today was based on news about the G20 communique and FASB rule, mainly the FASB rule change. Actually yesterday's move was also from the expectation of the FASB rule change. The rule change by FASB will do two adverse things: (1) make banks less likely to part with toxic assets - there goes Geithner plan bye bye, and (2) create uncertainty about the truthiness of the Banks' Balance sheet. How can a bank lend to another bank if they don't know the quality of the institution they are lending to? Beats me! The commonsense economics says that anything is worth what a buyer freely competing with other buyers is willing to pay for it and not what a seller wants. To say that the assets of the bank will be evaluated by banks themselves - really hocus pocus economics. They also say that there is no market for these assets - we also know this for ECON that there is no market for any asset that is priced wrongly. Plenty of people will buy these assets if they are priced right such as $0.20 on the $1. So, if they lower the price they will discover a market through the good old ECON 101 price discovery mechanism. But if they insist that they will not sell unless someone pays 0.80 or more, then of course there is no market like that. Now, FASB will allow the morons to keep these assets on their books marking them 0.80 or $1 or even $2 or whatever they need to show that they do not have capital problem on their balance sheets. This will make balance sheets of the banks worthless and no one will know which banks are ZOMBIES. No trade for tomorrow. I am looking to get on the short side soon.

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