Archive - Oct 2015

September was officially the warmest ever recorded around the globe (the 7th time this year a month has set a record) as El nino is back in a big way. As Bloomberg reports, its effects are just beginning in much of the world -- for the most part, it hasn’t really reached North America -- and yet it’s already shaping up potentially as one of the three strongest El Nino patterns since record-keeping began in 1950.  Expect "major disruptions, widespread droughts and floods," warned a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, adding that without preparation, "all kinds of mayhem will let loose." The last time there was an El Nino of similar magnitude to the current one, the record-setting event of 1997-1998, floods, fires, droughts and other calamities killed at least 30,000 people and caused $100 billion in damage.

It has been a horrible quarter for biotechs, and for AbbVie it just got worse.

Imagine global-currency war and proxy wars somehow, unexpectedly, blow up into a world war directly involving you.

"Some activity in auto loans reminds me of what happened in mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the crisis. We will be looking at those institutions that have a significant auto-lending operation."

Trump embodies the American zeitgeist, circa 2015 – its virtues, its vulgarity, its inchoate mixture of common sense and incoherence. You may not like Donald Trump, for any one of a number of reasons, but anti-interventionists have to give him some credit for opening up the presidential debate to a critique of US foreign policy that hasn’t been seen or heard since the Ron Paul campaign.

The Fed has created permanent housing crisis from which there is no escape.

"Anything that protects the Syrian people and Syria from partition, we will not spare any effort to carry it out with our Saudi and Turkish brothers, no matter what this is. If a military intervention will protect the Syrian people from the brutality of the regime, we will do it."

It's a long way down...

As John Kerry prepares to meet Sergei Lavrov in Vienna, Putin and Assad are drawing up plans to call for elections in Syria. The idea, of course, is that Assad will prevail in a landslide, allowing Moscow to claim that the people have spoken and the regime must rightfully be restored. 

Despite today's ridiculous melt-up in US equities - all driven by USDJPY-correlated algos - after the completion of over 9 months of this year, the median stock in the United States has officially gone nowhere.

Goldman: "we think a 10 bps (surprise) deposit cut is worth two big figures downside in EUR/$. At the very least, following today’s press conference, a December deposit cut is now possible, meaning that EUR/$ – which went into the meeting at around 1.13 – should reprice to 1.11....  there is a good chance that December will instead bring an actual augmentation of the QE program, such that downside in EUR/$ might be larger. The kind of scenarios our European economics team envisage imply downside of at least 5-6 big figures from here, i.e. should see us return to near the 1.05 low that EUR/$ made in March."

After running stops above $46 this morning, WTI Crude has tumbled back to test yestrerday's $44 handle lows... must be all that "growth" that Draghi promised...

"The gratuitous labeling of Iran as part of a worldwide “axis of evil” by President Bush combined with strong U.S. criticisms of Iran’s nascent nuclear program and its meddling in Iraq led Tehran to the view that Washington had embarked on a course of confrontation in the region that would soon set a kinetic focus on Iran. Even Iran’s positive engagement in helping repair the post Taliban political environment in Afghanistan was met with indifference by Washington."

History supports two narratives of rising inequality leading to social disintegration and political instability: one is inequality between the top classes and everyone else, and the the other is rising inequality within the top classes. When the pie starts shrinking and there aren't enough slices to satisfy the rising expectations of the top class, the elites splinter in profound political disunity.

So much for The Fed stepping back to weaken the USD and save US Corporate earnings...