Archive - 11769

That savage deleveraging - it has been truly... epically... unnoticeable...

Recall how the worthless KaloBios stock soared from almost nothing first to $10, then to $20 before finally peaking in the mid-$40s: the reason for that is that Martin Shrekli, since arrested, proceeded to buy  ever more of the KBIO float, making shorting first prohibitively expensive, and ultimately, impossible when he owned virtually all of the float. The PBOC did just that overnight...

Crude carnage continues and despite the best efforts of the USDJPY pumpers, US equity markets are tumbling along with oil (and copper)...

The Fed almost always gives Wall Street extra money to play around with during options expiration. $9 billion and change to be exact.

This is the title of its latest piece looking at retail spending paterns based on its credit and debit card data: "Confusingly cautious consumer." Here is why BofA so confused by the cautious consumers.

The crude curve has just collapsed, especially since the rebound after China’s Golden Week reprieve ended around October 15. As Alhambra's Jeff Snider notes, the entire futures curve is under $50, an upsetting commentary on everything from US "demand" to long-term implications and especially those that are derived from economists’ somehow continued insistence that this is all just "transitory."

U.S. stocks logged the worst week ever to kick off a new year; is this historically low reading on the “January Barometer” a bad omen going forward?

What goes down, must bounce dramatically higher... and all because PBOC squeezes Yuan short-sellers and unsustainably "stabilizes" outflows with 'temporary' capital controls...

Now that China renewed its currency devaluation over the past 2 weeks with the CNY and CNH both plunging and unleashing the latest round of cross-asset selling across the world, it was only a matter of time before China boosted, or at least tried to, capital controls once again. Which according to Bloomberg it did moments ago: when it "asked banks to limit Yuan outflows." Actually, since all Chinese banks are at least partially state-owned, change that "ask" to "order." Here are the details.

Having told banks and investors "don't panic" in September, amid spiking interbank lending rates and surging default/devaluation risks, it appears the massive shortage of dollars that we warned about in December has washed tsunami-like ashore in oil-producing Nigeria. Following the Central bank's decision this week to halt dollar sales to non-bank FX market operators, black market exchange rates spiked to 282/USD (vs 199 official) and CDS spiked to record highs implying drastic devaluations loom.

"Because this is a bear market, strength is to be sold into and we had hoped that yesterday’s early strength in the US equity futures would be of a sufficient nature that would allow us the opportunity to sell. It never came.... when it does we’ll be prepared to sell the S&P futures short."

Just days after The Fed admitted "we got it wrong" on the "unequivocally good" low oil prices, BP has joined a long list of energy entities slashing jobs. The oil company will cut 4,000 jobs in exploration and production because of toughening market conditions "we need to take specific steps to ensure our business remains competitive and robust."

Apparently, the market isn't buying the notion that a Saudi Aramco IPO will be enough to shore up Riyadh's fiscal fiasco...

"Given that no fundamental relationship is currently driving the oil market towards any equilibrium, prices are being moved almost entirely by financial flows caused by fluctuations in other asset prices, including the USD and equity markets,” Horsnell said. "We think prices could fall as low as $10/bbl before most of the money managers in the market conceded that matters had gone too far."