Archive - Oct 2015 - Story

In a furious race to shore up as much liquidity as possible, Glencore - which a month ago announced a dramatic deleveraging plan - and its peers have been quietly scrambling to raise billions in secured funding. Case in point none other than Glencore's biggest competitor and the largest independent oil trader in the world, Swiss-based, Dutch-owned Vitol Group, whose Swiss unit Vitol SA earlier today raised a record $8 billion in loans.

For SocGen, as a result of a rather unfortunate credibility-losing accident, the Fed will not be one of the two major factor that will drive markets in the fourth quarter. So what will? According to the French bank, it is all up to China and Earnings now.

"I don’t hide tattoos, I don’t take earrings out. I just don’t do that, because ultimately if you don’t like who I am, you’re not going to like what I do."

Russia can be seen as maneuvering to split OPEC into two blocs, with Russia, although not a member, persuading the “Russian bloc” to isolate Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab OPEC members within OPEC. This might persuade the Saudis to seek a compromise with the have nots.

"That’s why I often said that monetary policy was not a panacea — we needed Congress to do its part. After the crisis calmed, that help was not forthcoming. When the recovery predictably failed to lift all boats, the Fed often, I believe unfairly, took the criticism."

There are two ways of looking at the NYSE short interest, which as of September 15 surged by 1.4 billion to 18.4 billion shares or just shy of the level hit on July 31, 2008: one is that a massive short squeeze is about to be unleashed, sending the S&P500 to new all time highs; the other is that just as the record short interest in July 2008 correctly predicted the biggest financial crisis in history and all those shorts covered at huge profits, so another historic market collapse is just around the corner.

"A smart politician can see that if somehow the consumption of middle-class householders keeps rising, if they can afford a new car every few years and the occasional exotic holiday, and best of all, a new house, they might pay less attention to their stagnant monthly paychecks. And one way to expand consumption, even while incomes stagnate, is to enhance access to credit."

We have just witnessed one of the most significant steps toward a one world economic system that we have ever seen.  Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been completed, and if approved it will create the largest trading bloc on the planet.  In this treaty, Barack Obama has thrown in all sorts of things that he never would have been able to get through Congress otherwise.  And once this treaty is approved, it will be exceedingly difficult to ever make changes to it.  So essentially what is happening is that the Obama agenda is being permanently locked in for 40 percent of the global economy.

The Kremlin has thus far observed some semblance (and we do emphasize the word “some”) of decorum in criticizing the West’s approach to Syria. The nicetites just went out the window...

“It feels like someone just flipped the switch to ‘off’ without any concrete reasoning,” one of the executives commented.

"If Donald Trump doesn’t fall, I'll either move out of the country or join the resistance. I just think it's a phenomenon of reality television as politics and I think that that is how it started. Reality television, as you all know, is based on conflict. All he is is about conflict and it's all about the negative conflict. He's a self-promoting huckster who found a vein, a vein of meanness and nastiness."

"Our model indicates the US equity market could potentially drop by 30% in the event of an ‘EM lost decade’ and by 60% in the event of a China hard landing (i.e. S&P 500 back to its lows)."

Courtesy of Sharelynx' Nick Laird who tracks precious metal premium by vendor, we continue our recent series showing the discrepancy between paper and physical metals, in this case silver. As Nick notes, APMEX price premiums are a lot higher than the Monex. And as can be seen in the charts below, premiums rose above 50% for 1-19 coins & above 40% for 500 plus coins.

"The strong stock market rally during the last few days has pushed the S&P 500 near its highest closing level since the correction began in late August. This has boosted optimism that the recent selloff may be ending. While this could certainly prove to be the case, we remain less sanguine that the vulnerabilities, which initially produced this correction, have yet to be resolved. Ultimately, we expect a more fearful investment culture suggesting a final capitulation and more importantly, a lower stock market valuation level able to withstand a less hospitable recovery as the economy nears full employment."