naked capitalism

I came up with this in revising an article.

The US circa 1929 and China now:

Alpha creditor.

Readers no doubt recall that the Fed announced the creation of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which will lend as much as $200 billion against new or recent vintage asset backed securities collateralized by “student loans, auto loans, credit card loans, and loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration.” One wonders if the order reflects the Fed’s priorities.

Most commentators saw this as part of an effort to jump start consumer spending. But this may all come too late to help an important and neglected target, small businesses.

Even though the Fed’s press release gave lip service to assisting small enterprises, they may have meant the SBA component. However, credit cards are an important source of funding for small businesses. Indeed, Amar Bhide, in his landmark book, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses, found that savings, friends and family, and credit cards were the most important sources of funding for startups. And they are also important on an ongoing basis. For instance, a friend who had a 100 person company with some outside investors, nevertheless maxed out on his credit cards more than once to keep the enterprise afloat. So it isn’t just teeny operations that find credit cards a valuable source of funding.

I’ve been told that American Express, which aggressively courted small business owners, has turned of the spigot on some important products. I don’t know the full scope of Amex’s credit business offerings, but it had at least two types of credit lines, one a free standing program “Business Capital Line” which had an annual fee, and one attached to the Corporate Optima card.

The particularly useful feature of both was that they provided checks, and offered better rates than bank overdraft lines and reasonably high credit limits. They were good for businesses of that awkward size where they might not be big enough to capture the attention of the business lending area of a bank (and based on some tales I have heard, I would never have unsecured borrowings with the same bank where I carried significant balances, which is precisely what the banks want you to do. Banks have been known to grab all the deposits, business and personal, of an indebted business that looks to be in a terminal decline. And even though they do not have the right to seize the assets willy-nilly, guess what? It’s kind of hard to fight them when they have all your dough).

Even a well managed business with with reasonably stable revenue has unexpected events. Shit happens. An owner can dig into his own pocket, but access to credit can not only tide over short-term cash needs, but also provide expansion capital.

So what has Amex done? it has effectively closed down both products. Business Capital Line credit for checks has been cut to 1/10th the available credit for the moment, with no new checkwriting at all as of the new year; the Optima Credit line has ended all checkwriting (customer can use the card for purchases, where Amex earns a fee from the merchant).

Now those customers who used the Amex products in lieu of a bank credit line are stranded. Think a bank is going to give a small business owner new to them a meaningful level of credit in this environment? Doubtful.

While banks are cutting credit exposures fast and hard, this move is dramatic, particularly in light of Amex’s previous efforts to target this market.

OPEC’s meeting over the weekend, which held off from making further cuts despite oil prices hovering in the low $50s per barrel, a level that is causing distress among the cartels’ members.

What was eyecatching, however, was not the failure to act per se but the byplay. As we noted earlier, OPEC members tend to cheat even in good times and pump in excess of quotas. The incentive to exceed limits is even greater when national budgets are strained by a plunge in oil revenues, the mainstay of these economies. We had posted on the fact that Nigeria, which had conformed to the latest production cut, would not implement an additional reduction until other OPEC members lived up to their recent commitment.

OPEC members said they would like to reduce production a further million to million and a half barrels in December, but the Saudis, backing Nigeria’s position, are apparently asking for proof that other members are indeed living up to quotas.

This could get interesting.

Note some further novel moves, again signs of strain:

1. OPEC has set a target price of $75 a barrel (note they had abandoned targets four years ago). A lot of oil stock analysts have their targets at $90.

2. OPEC is now calling for non cartel-members to help. This is further evidence of the producer group’s diminished power. Consider this bit from Bloomberg:

[OPEC Secretary General] El-Badri called for outside help to halt the plunge in prices. “All non-OPEC should come and help, it is a big burden for OPEC,” he told reporters. As well as Russia, “the ones we know that have the capability to cut are Norway and Mexico.”

Russia’s energy minister is expected to attend the Algeria meeting, El-Badri said. His plea for help elsewhere may fall on deaf ears after Norway, the world’s fifth-biggest oil exporter, ruled out production cuts earlier this month. “I don’t see any scenarios with regards to that,” Norwegian Oil Minister Terje Riis-Johansen said in a Nov. 18 interview.

Russia also seems unlikely to cooperate, given its dependence on oil revenues and the fact that it has already spent a fifth of its FX reserves defending its currency.

Some analysts also seem newly-skeptical of the likelihood of oil reaching higher levels any time soon. From Reuters:

$75 a barrel doesn’t look doable in the short term,” said Raja Kiwan of consultancy PFC Energy. “Given the fractious nature of OPEC on quota compliance, they may have some problems.”

Sorry for the short list tonight, but I need to get on a more normal schedule.

Protection boost for rare gorilla BBC

Obama Team Seeks Possible Change to Aries, Orion Space News

Another View: How to Save the U.S. Auto Industry J. Ronald Trost (who negotiated the Chrysler rescue), DealBook (hat tip Credit Slips). The problem with all these clever financial strategies is that they ignore the consumer. Surveys have found that as many as 80% of carbuyers would not buy a vehicle from a bankrupt manufacturer. Ask people you know. So far, I have gotten a 100% negative response. And failing dealers, who provide service, is also a deterrent.

Why Did TARP Change Course? Roger Ehrenberg. A new line of thought.

Credit-Card Fees Targeted by Retailers Who Say Banks Overcharge Bloomberg, The issue is merchant charges, not those to the consumer.

Do We Overrate Basic Research? Steve Lohr, New York Times. FYI, the author of the research, Amar Bhide, is a friend of mine, and also unfailingly smart and provocative.

Antidote du jour:

You simply cannot make this up. I found a section of this priceless commentary from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe via Marc Faber’s latest newsletter (hat tip reader Dean), and had to verify it. The original provides an even richer mine of material.

From the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (boldface theirs):

As Monetary Authorities, we have been humbled and have taken heart in the realization that some leading Central Banks, including those in the USA and the UK, are now not just talking of, but also actually implementing flexible and pragmatic central bank support programmes where these are deemed necessary in their National interests.

That is precisely the path that we began over 4 years ago in pursuit of our own national interest and we have not wavered on that critical path despite the untold misunderstanding, vilification and demonization we have endured from across the political divide.

Yet there are telling examples of the path we have…For instance, when the USA economy was recently confronted by the devastating effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as well as the Iraq war, their Central Bank stepped in and injected life-boat schemes in the form of billions of dollars that were printed and pumped into the American economy.

Yves here. The authorities here would counter that the Katrina-related stimulus was appropriate in light of the macro shock, while Zimbabwe has taken a good construct beyond the breaking point. Billions, after all, are not a big deal in a $14 trillion economy. A difference in degree is a difference in kind.

Back to the Reserve Bank:

….the USA economy confronted a severe mortgage crisis… The USA Central Bank again responded by injecting over US$160 billion between December, 2007 and March, 2008…. leading central banks in the global economy are bailing out troubled economic sectors to achieve macroeconomic and financial stability….the Bank of England… providing a £50 billion lifeline to the UK’s banking sector.

Here in Zimbabwe we had our near-bank failures a few years ago and we responded by providing the affected Banks with the Troubled Bank Fund (TBF) for which we were heavily criticized even by some multi-lateral institutions who today are silent when the Central Banks of UK and USA are going the same way and doing the same thing under very similar circumstances thereby continuing the unfortunate hypocrisy that what’s good for goose is not good for the gander….

As Monetary Authorities, we commend those of our peers, the world over, who have now seen the light on the need for the adoption of flexible and practical interventions and support to key sectors of the economy when faced with unusual circumstances.

The operating assumption behind US policy now is seeing the US situation as parallel to that of the US in the Depression, and taking the view, based on the fact that the US seemed to finally shake off the slump with the demands of wartime production and the unprecedented budget deficits that accompanied them. But there were considerable worries in 1946 that the US would fall back into Depression. The conventional view is that pent-up demand carried the US through, after a sharp but very short downturn in 1946.

However, would this strategy have worked in a peacetime setting? The US also emerged from its slump to a world with a tremendous amount of industrial production destroyed by the war. Thus, the US, whose problem in the late 1920s (which didn’t look like a problem at the time) was that it was a huge exporter, to the point where it sucked up so much gold as to be destabilizing to the financial system, could with 50% of world GDP, revert to its preferred old role with less damaging side effects. Had the rest of the world gone into wartime levels of stimulus along with the US, without the loss of productive capacity, would there ever have been an end of the beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies of the 1930s? International trade didn’t just fall, “collapsed” is not an uncommon characterization of the degree of contraction.

I am not saying my line of thinking is right, but the US remedy worked (or appeared to work) in a particular set of circumstances very different from the ones on offer (we hope, at least, I don’t think anyone outside the Rapture crowd would advocate another world war as a remedy to the slowdown).

Similarly, as we have said before, the US was a world-dominating exporter, as China is now, and had the biggest gold reserves, as China now had the largest FX reserves. Thus it is China that needs to undergo a huge-scale stimulus program to make up for the loss of demand from the US. Keynes, in the 1930s, advocated that the US make up for the demand loss rather than expecting the US’s overindebted European trade partners to continue overconsuming. (Note that China’s recently announced $500 billion plus stimulus package is less than meets the eye. Analysts have estimated that 1/3, some say as little as 1/6, is spending not already planned, and most of that occurs in the second year of this two-year program).

Yet what is being advocated as a Keynesian remedy is in fact the opposite of what Keynes called for in his day. Keynes’ prescription then would lead to a global rebalancing, with the US depending more on internally generated demand and less on its foreign partners (who were defaulting on their government debt). But if it were successfully deployed in the US now, it wold lead to a continuation, of our excessive consumption and China’s underdevelopment of its internal demand.

So why don’t we lean on China harder? A few quick thoughts:

1. China does not take well to being told what to do, particularly when we their biggest borrower is looking a tad wobbly and not a particularly good model of fiscal and economic management

2. China becoming a consumer-led economy will not come about via a big stimulus program, no matter how much money is thrown at it. This is a twenty-year transformation.

First, China’s leaders are afraid of giving up its wage differential advantage, Workers would need to be paid a lot more to be able to consume more (recall this was Henry Ford’s great insight” by paying factor workers well, he was creating buyers for his products). I don’t have a ready citation, but the wage share of China’s economic expansion is very low.

Second, China needs much more extensive social safety nets for workers to be willing to save less. With a one-child policy, no health care insurance, no unemployment or welfare, savings are the old good fallback.

Third, because of the great wage differential, China’s present manufacturing capacity in many cases cannot easily be repurposed to make goods that would appeal to domestic workers (even with China’s low by Western standards capital intensity of manufacturing, production today in general is more specialized than in the 1930s. Think of the long supply chains, for instance).

So having the US engage in stimulus instead is arguably a best-available option, but it looks perilously like a desperate attempt to create status quo ante, but with more debt and credit risk sitting on government balance sheets.

And those who would dispute the claims of Dr. G. Gono, chairman of the Zimbabwe Reserve Banks’ claims of comradeship can also point to this factoid:

….the monetary base… increased by 72 percent from September 10 to November 19 of this year. We should also note that the money supply – whether measured by M1 or by MZM – has increased by less than 1 percent.

One can characterize this pattern as either that the Fed has done the right thing by combatting deleveraging or that the Fed is pushing on a string. But either way, the assumption is that all of the central bank’s efforts to pump prime will finally take hold and we’ll get some good old fashioned reflation, and the Fed can mop up the excess liquidity. But will it be able to move fast enough? How bad might the overshoot be? The Fed is presumably going to be reluctant to put the brakes on too quickly for fear of putting the economy back into a contraction, so the worry about inflation when the upswing kicks in, particularly with more countries on the stimulus program than in the 1930s, is not nuts.

Dr. Gono is glad to have company. We can only hope that his comparison is erroneous.

This ought to be a celebratory event, the scrutiny of a powerful player in the financial system who heretofore seemed immune to criticism. And what is interesting about the spotlight on Citigroup consigliere and board member Robert Rubin is that, unlike Greenspan, the reassessment is starting while he would still appear to have his hands on the reins of power. After all, he is still on Citi’s board; his protege Timothy Geithner is slotted to become Treasury Secretary, his buddy Larry Summer is head-of-the-National-Economic-Council-in-waiting.

Yet if the reaction in New York is any indication, the outrage about the speed and size of the second Citigroup rescue is considerable, and a recent Wall Street Journal piece fingered Rubin as a moving force behind Citi’s disastrous strategy to take on more risk in debt markets in pursuit of profit and better competitive rankings. And the only consequences to Rubin will be (hopefully) lasting damage to his reputation. But he gets to keep his cash and prizes.

Rubin refuses to take an iota of responsibility for the bank’s tsuris (and that also comes from the Goldman playbook. The firm always circles the wagons and admits nothing). Get a load of this:

Robert Rubin said its problems were due to the buckling financial system, not its own mistakes, and that his role was peripheral to the bank’s main operations even though he was one of its highest-paid officials.

“Nobody was prepared for this,” Mr. Rubin said in an interview. He cited former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as another example of someone whose reputation has been unfairly damaged by the crisis.

Yves here. Unfairly damaged? Is this what leadership amount to in America? You have the power, you get the perks, but you only take credit for the good stuff?

A very simple psychological construct places people on a spectrum of internalizing versus externalizing (boldface ours):

When something goes wrong, we look for answers as to why-what caused this? How we deal with setbacks has enormous implications for how we feel about ourselves during these difficult times. Some people take the responsibility onto themselves-”it must have been because of something I did or didn’t do.” We can call these people internalizers because they internalize the responsibility. This can lead to feelings of depression if one’s self-esteem takes too much of a beating. However, sometimes there is also the promise of a brighter future-”maybe I can do this differently next time so it turns out better.” Other people are more likely to place the controlling factor outside of themselves-”it must have been someone else.” We can call these people externalizers. In some cases, they will act out in anger over a bad situation. Externalizing frees them of any feelings of self-criticism or guilt, but it also leaves them powerless over the situation unless circumstances change. So, the price they pay is that they don’t learn anything new.

Salesmen are typically externalizers.

Note the uncanny parallel in word choice with Rubin in this tidbit:

The self-talk of the Externalizer is all about the defectiveness of others and the “unfairness of it all.”

Back to the Journal:

Its [Citi's] troubles have put the former Treasury secretary in the awkward position of having to justify $115 million in pay since 1999…

Yves again. Please, his pay should have been questioned long before now. He did not have his name on any deals, and he claims not to have gotten his hands dirty. Indeed, he contends the problem was not the strategy, but the execution, and by implication he had nothing to do with that.

Are we expected to buy that? Did any firm that went out on the risk curve do well? The only reason Goldman was less damaged for a while was that two traders told the management committee that they thought subprime was way overvalued and the firm put on shorts that exceeded its long position. That was serendipity (combined with some intellectual flexibility in the top ranks).

Back to the Journal:

Mr. Rubin said his pay was justified and that there were higher-paying opportunities available to him. “I bet there’s not a single year where I couldn’t have gone somewhere else and made more,” he said…..

Yves again. Yes, and I could make a lot more money dealing drugs, or better yet, providing financing to terrorists (one of my buddies says they make an absolute fortune). The issue is did you deliver value to Citi that bore any relationship to what you were paid? What you could have made elsewhere doing something different is a distraction from the question at hand.

To Rubin again:

Mr. Rubin said it is a company’s risk-management executives who are responsible for avoiding problems like the ones Citigroup faces. “The board can’t run the risk book of a company,” he said. “The board as a whole is not going to have a granular knowledge” of operations…..

They do at Sandater, in fact, they consider that to be the board’s most important responsibility. They meet twice weekly. Investment banks, when they were private, had management committees that similarly watched risks like a hawk. So “can’t” is counterfactual. “Generally don’t” is more accurate. The wipeout in the banking industry strongly suggests that this deliberate inattention to one of the most important determinants of profits and long-term survival was a fatally flawed policy.

Back to the Journal:

The decision has been blamed in part for Citigroup’s problems, including the growth of its CDO holdings amid signs the mortgage market was unraveling. Mr. Rubin doubts that’s true. “It was not an inflection point,” he said, but “I just don’t know what would have happened” if the decision had been different.

At the time, Mr. Rubin was saying in speeches that most assets were overvalued. He would quote a noted investor he knew as saying that “the only undervalued asset class in the world is risk.”

Yves again. So he denies that the CDOs or the assumption of more risk had anything to do with Citi’s near death experience, despite the evidence in the form of huge writewdown on recent positions. And at the same time he was supporting Citi’s bigger bets, he was saying externally, in public, that assets were overpriced and investors were not getting paid enough for risk assumption? It will never happen, but I would love to see a great litigator like David Boies have a go at Rubin under oath.

There is much more in this article, but it illustrates a pathology operative in our society. Why have we gravitated to leaders and advisors who built Potemkin villages and tell us that is progress, and then deny that they have any responsibility? This pattern has become widespread in Teflon CEOs and public officials. And the converse delivers better results. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, found that the CEOs of the very best performing companies were modest, shared credit for what went right and took blame for failures, the opposite of the Rubin/prevailing US pattern. And they also paid themselves modestly by modern standards.

Read the entire article, if you have the stomach for it.

I am puzzled by some recent market anomalies, which are breakdowns of established patterns:

1. Long dated Treasuries rising (a deflation signal) as stocks stage a dramatic rally

2. Dollar weakening while long dated Treasuries rise (the dollar and bonds usually go together)

3. Oil stocks rallying more than the S&P (28% versus 18%) when oil prices continue to weaken and heating oil looks primed to fall

Now there are explanations for the appreciation in long-dated Treasuries that do not reflect just deflation worries. When the drop in CPI for October appeared to send a deflationary signal (and some analysts disputed this reading), Treasuries rallied disproportionately due not just routine short covering (ie. by point of view speculators), but the fact that the alchemists of certain complex products had used Treasury shorts to lower the cost of the product. The additional rally this week was due the announcement of the program for the Fed to buy GSE paper directly. That bond investors who held MBS assume that the duration of their MBS would shorten due to increased refis and they bought long maturity bonds to maintain duration.

The outlook for the dollar is very much in dispute. Macro Man thinks we are years away from serious dollar weakness:

So in Macro Man’s view, any dollars “created” by the Fed to expand its balance sheet (and let’s not forget, they have yet to really crack out the printing presses by not sterilizing their asset purchases) will merely partially offset dollars lost through de-leveraging and the implosion of the shadow banking system, rather than finding their way into new the purchase of fresh turds.

This comment from EconoSpeak supports MacroMan’s point:

Paul [Krugman] graphs the monetary base, which increased by 72 percent from September 10 to November 19 of this year. We should also note that the money supply – whether measured by M1 or by MZM – has increased by less than 1 percent. Over the same period, this has been a very substantial increase in bank reserves. Much of what the Fed has been doing has been to accommodate this increase in bank reserves so as to avoid a fall in the money supply..

The concern I have is the authorities keep saying the objective of this exercise is to get banks lending again….now….which presumably means on top of all the loans already made. Their aims are bigger than what Macro Man suggests, at least as far as I can tell (the latest example: an economist I know who has the ear of some policy makers suggested that PE firms buy banks, to shore up the leveraged loan market. Guess every underwater credit gets a rescue.)
And Jesse does a particularly brutal takedown of the Krugman argument (a specific illustration of one of our pet observations, “persisting in a failed course of action is not a sign of intelligence”):

However, to try and make the case that the Fed can “only” control reserves and the currency base, the monetary base, is an old canard trotted out by the likes of Greenspan and his ilk when they wish to make the case that things are happening, like enormous bubbles, that are beyond the Fed’s control. This is a Clintonian use of the word ‘control’ and is always and everywhere rubbish.

The Fed’s power, its influence, is profound, and ever moreso in this era of aggressive financial engineering. Krugman uses that narrow argument to point to the Adjusted Monetary Base as his sole metric and say, “See the monetary base went up in the Depression in his Chart 1, just as it is today in Chart 2. Therefore there was no error from the Fed at that time because it was all that they could do.”

We have noted that the devaluation of the dollar (1934) was key to getting the stricken US back on its feet: Jesse makes the same obsersation. But getting the dollar cheap enough to restore our trade balance is a fraught exercise. Too precipitous a decline risk a currency crisis and much higher dollar funding costs. And worse, the dollar has to be perceived to be likely to stay at a lower level on a sustained basis to lead to increased investment and skill building in export oriented industries (we have ceded entire industries, like shoe manufacturing, when we ought to have been able to retain some of it. However, executives at manufacturers have told me that Wall Street pushed hard for offshoring, seeing it as a plus for the bottom line, when the calculus was often not so straightforward).
The counterargument comes from Chris Watling via the Financial Times:

The outlook for the dollar is poor.

In the short term an expected equity market rally, quite plausibly the beginning of a cyclical, although not secular, bull market should bring an end to the dollar’s recent “repatriation rally”. The inverse correlation of the dollar and the S&P 500 is well established and not expected to break any time soon, given the global macroeconomic backdrop. The short term trend should be further reinforced by the broken financial system which impairs the US economy’s ability to releverage and mutes the strength of its cyclical recovery. The inability to releverage precludes the US from leading the global economy out of this recession. That also reinforces the dollar’s short term unattractiveness.

In the medium term, the US economy faces significant, albeit not insurmountable, structural problems. In particular the interaction of a heavily indebted economy with a broken financial system suggests a decade of poor domestic economic growth as savings are rebuilt and trust in the system restored. The US is a debtor nation and owes the rest of the world more than $2,000bn (up from $750bn as recently as 2000). Indeed both the household and the government sectors have been dis-saving in recent years – a trend that now needs to reverse. All of which suggests an extended period of sub-par domestic economic growth….

A failure of the initial set of policies to reflate the economy is likely to lead to the next, more risky, set of policy choices – those involving unsterilised intervention. Given the breakdown of trust in the financial system, the lack of savings by the US and the continued deleveraging of balance sheets, however, those initial policies, aimed mostly at supporting the economy through creating credit (rather than increasing savings) seem destined to fail.

On the energy shares front, one could attribute that to the stock market looking further out than commodity markets and anticipating recovery. But that contradicts the deflation reaction in bonds. And in the Great Depression, commodities was the first asset class to recover, rebounding before stocks did.

A possible culprit is Wall Street analysts being slow to cut earnings forecasts in light of deteriorating fundamentals (and perhaps reluctance to reverse uber bullish calls of last summer so quickly). Reader Michael provides the latest forecast from Merrill Lynch (click to enlarge):

I don’t pretend to have answers here…..but some of these trends are not going to hold.

As we have noted before, when oil prices are as low as they are now, OPEC members are in a classic prisoners’ dilemma. If they all adhere to production cuts, oil prices will be stronger as a result. But with governments badly dependent on oil revenues, the temptation to cheat is high. But if everyone cheats, the potential benefit of any cut is eroded.

Hopes for further production cuts at the next OPEC session appear to be fading. Nigeria has said they will not cut production further unless other members comply with October cuts. Are the two events related? Note the Nigerian oil minister took some pains to said that its statements did not indicate “a house divided.”

From Platts (hat tip reader Michael):

Nigeria would not reduce its oil output unless OPEC members implement the agreement for cuts made in October, Oil Minister Odein Ajumogobia said, state radio reported Thursday.

“At the last meeting, when there was a cut, we found out that a lot of countries did not comply, so,before we look at any further cut, we first want to be sure that everybody has complied,” Ajumogobia told reporters in Abuja Wednesday just before the weekly cabinet meeting.

From Reuters:

“Our primary concern at the consultative meeting will be the compliance of all members with previously agreed production allocation ceilings and to review market supply conditions,” [Nigerian] Oil Minister Odein Ajumogobia said on Thursday.

There is a rather odd article up on Reuters with the headline, “Short selling declines as U.S. stocks scrape new lows” It is mainly concerned with the issue of whether shorts are culprits in the recent price declines of automaker and certain financial shares. The declining short interest says the attempts to implicate them are most decidedly misguided. That part it does well, But some of its omissions are striking.

We’ve commented before that financial short interest is down, in the context of Citi. So that part is not news. And shorts on the automakers being down is no surprise.

But even though as the article indicates, financial shares are well off their July levels, they have also rebounded further off the recent bottom than most other shares. If you use, say, XLF as a proxy, financials have bounced 35% versus 18% for the market as a whole.

A big issue not mentioned in the Reuters piece is that, aside from the fact that the stocks are well down from their peak, is that both financials and auto companies are subject to government intention (the capital injections, the , making a short call much tricker than at other times.

And the article also neglects to mention that short interest is actually a bullish sign, since any short sale will eventually have to be covered with a purchase of the shares.

From Reuters:

…..since July 10, short interest on financial companies has fallen nearly 40 percent to an average of 3.68 percent on November 14, according to Short Alert Research data released this week.

Among brokerages, the decline in short interest – the ratio of stocks sold short to overall shares – was an even greater 43.5 percent.

Short interest in automakers has declined 32 percent in the past five months to roughly 11.5 percent,

And he was not the only casualty. From the New York Daily News:

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning….

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too…I literally had to fight people off my back.”