Archive - 11769 - Story

Is the U.S. economy in recession? Is it heading for recession? These questions can only be answered in hindsight, but it's worth looking for clues to what might be just ahead.

Today's renewed plunge in WTI Crude (on the verge of a '2' handle any second) has extended the Canadian Dollar's weakness (among many other oil producers). For the first time since early 2003, the Loonie is worth less than 70c... (anyone for skiing?)

With rate-hike odds plunging for every meeting across 2016, and bond yields collapsing almost as fast as stocks, it appears the market's faith in the The Fed is faltering fast...

Well that escalated quickli-er...

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)...

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."