Archive - Aug 2015

"Clearly, markets have lost faith in the ability of unorthodox monetary policies to kick start the economy over time. This also fits the findings of academic literature suggestion diminishing returns from subsequent rounds of QE."

"The head of a Chinese exchange that trades minor metals was captured by angry investors in a dawn raid and turned over to Shanghai police, as the investors attempted to force the authorities to investigate why their funds have been frozen."

After the Bloomberg commodity index crashed overnight, having tumbled for each of the past 4 years, this happened: BLOOMBERG COMMODITY INDEX SLIDES TO LOWEST LEVEL SINCE 1999

Said otherwise, the lowest level in the 21s centiry.  Yup, rate hike any minute now.

Anyone who listens to a mainstream media pundit, talking head, or spokes bimbo deserves the reaming they are going to receive.

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” – Ludwig von Mises

...and it just promises to get worse!

Moments ago, the $40 support level for oil finally snapped and with its so did Gartman's oil stop loss level, which means Gartman is now stopped out. Normally this would mean going long, however in this case China has yet to open and following the disappointment of no RRR-cut, tonight's commodity carnage may just be beginning.

"It is an old saying in commodities that the best cure for low prices is low prices. Market participants are now asking how much further prices need to fall and how long they need to stay there to bring supply and demand back in to balance and halt the price declines across a broad swathe of different raw materials markets. The fear is that just as the upside of the supercycle brought an unprecedented and long period of historical price highs, the plunge to the downside is shaping up to be equally dramatic and may yet have a way to run."

What makes a market is having differing opinions at nearly all times. It is therefore educational for people caught off guard last week to see -once more- that markets can drop at a savage speed (as opposed to the overall magnitude), regardless of whatever foggy economic situation we are in (or market participants believe them to be).

Stocks aren’t quite as immune to financial disruption in the middle of 2015 as they had been previously. We are starting to see the legend of QE fade into nothing more than memory, exposing all these “markets” to the very real dangers of the fundamental economy, globally, that never joined the hype. Does that mean QE4,5, or 6? It might, but at this point is there any illusion left?

On Friday, ahead of the closing stock rout, we forecast that the biggest risk for anyone staying long over the weekend was a disappointment out of China, where the sellside had gotten so excited that a 50-100bps RRR cut was imminent, that the lack of one would surely send futures sliding. Sure enough, as we noted earlier today, much to everyone's surprise and disappointment, the PBOC did nothing (for reasons we speculated upon earlier). Which bring us to this evening's S&P futures, which opened for trading minutes ago, and as expected, gapped by over 0.6% after the Chinese disappointment, down 13 points to 1958 and looking quite heavy.

But they said "it" didn't matter?

The world’s poorest countries are not characterized by naive trust in capitalism, but by utter distrust, which leads to heavy government intervention and regulation of business. Under such conditions, capitalism does not thrive and economies remain poor. Pope Francis is right to focus attention on the plight of the world’s poorest. Their misery, however, is not the consequence of unbridled capitalism, but of a capitalism that has been bridled in just the wrong way.

Want further evidence of the misappropriation of taxpayer funds to post-secondary education? Look no further than the Pell grant program.

“The war on drugs is over,... And we lost. There is no way we can arrest our way out of this." Situated on the coast of Massachusetts, Gloucester’s claims to fame include its status as “America’s original seaport,” as well as being the real-life location on which events in the movie The Perfect Storm (2000) were based. Now, the small town has a new reason to be the center of attention: its police have been granting complete amnesty to drug users who come to the station seeking help, even if they come bearing the remainder of their stash.