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The chart below, which shows last Friday’s intraday action in 30-yr Treasuries vs. the S&P500 Index, says it all: Retrenchment. Indeed, personally, I don’t think we have made any progress last week. This is perhaps reflected in wider credit spreads (CDX IG12 20 bps wider, to 143bps), lower equity prices, and the action in mortgages last Thursday.

I have recently been thinking at the ultra-macro level. Bear with me, please. I’ve come to realize that since the French Revolution, humans have been growing up, have been raised, have been educated and are educating their children under the paradigm that proposes that value can be added by “creation”, by “innovation”. When we don’t innovate, when we don’t create, we assume no value is created.  But now think of the children in Ancient Greece: They grew up listening to the story of the sacking of Troy. Pillaging was honorable and Achilles was legendary three thousand years ago. There was honor in conquering. Value was added by taking, not creating. This notion must have lasted a while, because even under Elizabeth I, people were fascinated with characters like Francis Drake (and understandably so, given what Sir Drake contributed to the kingdom’s coffers). However, in those days, there was consistency between politics and economics. The political apparatus, the legal system, encouraged monopolies, sacking, taking from other nations, while our current “value creation” paradigm is not consistent. We are told we add value innovating. But our legal systems encourage oligopolies every time our central banks and governments decide to bail out dinosaurs; mediocrity, when economic success is taxed at increasing rates; and paralysis, when relative prices are manipulated and we ignore the future value of today’s medium of exchange. But value creation only works if people can accumulate capital. To accumulate capital, people must save. To save, people must know, ex ante, that what they save will be safe. Saving is boring and hard. It means restricting consumption today, in favor of consumption tomorrow. The British played this game right for a century, between say 1815 and 1914, thanks in many ways to David Ricardo. But then, then people thought they could cheat a bit. We thought we could get away without the hardships of saving, as long as we managed an “optimal” speed of money supply. We experimented a lot with it, particularly after World War II. Today, the latest expression of this illusion is the famous Taylor’s rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_rule ). The illusion continues as we anxiously await now the FOMC meeting to tell us, on June 24th, what the monetization speed will be, what assets it will use (Treasuries, agency debt, mortgages). Uncertainty is preventing investors from putting their savings to work. More so, when we read of major regulatory reforms every week. The bottom line? I think we can step to the sidelines in equities and Treasuries. Will sellers of Treasuries continue to reallocate funds to credit? I don’t know. The waters are divided here, with some analysts on either side, both in investment grade and high yield. But under uncertainty and inconsistency, liquidity gains relevance once more, favoring index positions, vs. single names… What is left to trade this week? Event risk? I don’t like it…

June 19th, 2009 Intraday: 30-yr Treasury vs. S&P500 Index (orange)

Source: Bloomberg                                Analysis: A View from the Trenches