Archive - Apr 9, 2015

Canadian students are (still) restless...

Are you currently an official at a US-dominated multinational institution seeking an exciting new career opportunity? If so, The Asian Infrastructure Investment bank may be just the place for you...

Instead of leaving its own production flat in an attempt to stabilize oil prices and hit its "optimistic" outlook sooner rather than never, Saudi Arabia would boost production quite sharply to claw back market share. Specifically al-Naimi, revealed that the kingdom’s oil production in March was 10.3-million barrels a day – a record high. .. Why is Saudi Arabia opening the spigot? There is no doubt that country’s own domestic demand is rising, thanks to heavy investment in new refineries, requiring more production. But it also appears that Saudi Arabia is making renewed push for market share for fear that a gusher of Iranian oil will soon hit the export markets as the Iranian embargo is ratcheted back

Yes they can...

As the international community struggles to understand how the interplay between a series of US foreign policy failures and geopolitical wrangling over what are viewed as “strategic” Middle Eastern states has somehow managed to produce multiple bloody proxy wars, there are many who still ask: “Who is ISIS?” A new piece from The Atlantic seeks answers from Iraqis with first-hand experience.

GM is halting production of the Chevrolet Volt electric car for the summer to whittle down about seven months of unsold inventory and smooth the way for the next generation of the plug-in hybrid sedan. Production of the current model, which costs $34,000 and up before federal tax credits, will halt early next month, the Detroit auto maker has said. It will be replaced by a 2016 model with a sleeker design and up to 50 miles range on an electric charge. That second generation Volt will go into production at the end of the summer.

In a shocking development, earlier today in the Palace of Justice in Central Milan located 1 kilometer away from Milan's Duomo cathedral - a major tourist attraction - a scene unfolded as if lifted from an Italian mob film, when a man on trial in a bankruptcy case opened fire killing the judge, a lawyer and a witness in the case against him according to emergency services reports. Reuters reports that the Police arrested the man, whom they named as Claudio Giardiello, in Vimercate, a town north of Italy's financial center, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano tweeted. He is being held at a military barracks nearby.

Yesterday's 10 Year auction was impressive, but one can't say the same about the just concluded, and final for the week, 30 Year reopening auction of Cusip RK6 which saw a whopping tail 3 bps to the 2.567% When Issued, when the the High Yield priced at 2.597% (still, about 8 bps tighter than the March 30 auction). The main driver of this subpar demand was not the Bid to Cover ratio, which while very low in historical terms was unchanged from last month at 2.18%, but the collapse in the Direct bid, which took down just 7%, the first single digits Direct take down since May of 2014, and the lowest overall since the 4.9% in March of 2013. However, the Direct slack was more than eagerly sopped up by foreign central banks which took down a near record 51.3%, just shy of the all time high of 53.2%. Dealers were left with 41.8%.

Despite what Bernanke says now, monetary policy is still talked about as if it were “pro-growth” and “stimulus”, powers that even its main proponent and practitioner no longer admits. The enduring legacy is bubbles and cycles, or, again to be fully specific, bubble-based supercycles. The problem is that the 14 million “lost” labor potential may only be the beginning.

Fuku Nuku ... No Beaucoup

It appears that when the US inadvertantly "misplaced" $500 million of weapons in Yemen, the bulk of which fell right in Houthi rebel hands, it created a very credible adversary... for the US and its Saudi-backed coalition allies. Because despite the bombing campaign by the Saudi-headed coalition, AP reports that the rebels seized a key provincial capital in a heavily Sunni tribal area on Thursday as their patron Iran called the two-week air campaign a "crime" and appealed for peace talks. According to media reports the Houthius overran Ataq, capital of the oil-rich southeastern Shabwa province, after days of airstrikes and clashes with local Sunni tribes. The capture marked the rebels' first significant gain since the Saudi-led bombing began.

Spain is not the good example to contrast Greece's bad example.

"We find that in previous oil-sector downturns, job growth in non-energy sectors that are closely related to the oil & gas industry has declined by three to four times as much as the decline in oil & gas employment itself," Goldman says, implying we're likely to see a substantial number of cuts in the months ahead.

This great generational injustice is the direct consequence of central banks lowering interest rates to zero and inflating asset bubbles in a corrosive (and vain) attempt to generate a wealth effect of households borrowing and blowing their newly created asset wealth. In an economy that isn't whipsawed by central bank manipulation, the difference between middle class households' asset wealth is largely behavioral, not the random luck of coming of age before central banks began blowing destructive asset bubbles as a matter of policy.