Archive - Nov 2015 - Story

Gobble, gobble, gobble...

The bull market in U.S. equities has narrowed over the past 6 months as strength has become concentrated in large cap stocks. Recently, strength has narrowed even among those large caps.

China's aluminum and nickel producers have asked Beijing to buy up surplus metal, sources said, the first coordinated effort since 2009 to revive prices suffering their worst rout since the global financial crisis. China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association had suggested that the state buys 900,000 tonnes of aluminum, 30,000 tonnes of refined nickel, 40 tonnes of indium, and 400,000 tonnes of zinc. Or, in other words, "QE for metals."

On Monday, Mauricio Macri, the son of Italian-born construction tycoon Francesco Macri, beat out Cristina Kirchner’s handpicked successor Daniel Scioli for Argentina’s presidency in what amounted to a referendum on 12 years of Peronist rule. Now, Macri faces a trio of daunting tasks: i) restore central bank liquidity, ii) implement a new FX regime, and iii) tackle the ballooning budget deficit. The most most pressing concern: the central bank is literally out of dollars. 

"The dealer market has collapsed, and all that's left are investors trading the same few bonds back and forth, leaving pricing services guessing with bigger and bigger margins of error on the real value of illiquid debt. That's the real problem. And it's not one the SEC can fix by targeting 'transcendent liquidity' in ETFs."

U.S. drone operators are inflicting heavy civilian casualties and have developed an institutional culture callous to the death of children and other innocents, four former operators said at a press briefing today in New York. “We have seen the abuse firsthand... and we are horrified.”

“Unknown air traffic position onto Humeymim 020, redirect to 26 miles. This is Turkish Air Force speaking - en guard. You are approaching Turkish airspace. Change your heading south immediately."

So if Draghi pulls a "Draghi" on December 3, and stuns the market by admitting he merely jawboned the ECB's "assured" easing to death, with the EUR now pricing in both a 15 bps rate cut and more QE, and thus making any actual by the ECB meaningless (and why should the ECB actually launch a bazooka round when jawboning is enough) you have been warned.

What do you do when all of the low hanging fruit is gone? That question is one that oil producers are increasingly facing as they confront an oil price slump that is now more than a year old and shows no serious signs of abating.

When it comes to NATO and the West you can always find a contradiction or two (or five) when it comes to foreign policy rhetoric which is why we weren’t at all surprised (although we were amused) with what we found when we decided to take a look back at what Erdogan said in 2012 after Assad’s air force shot down a Turkish F-4 phantom jet when it crossed into Syrian airspace.

A modest production cut this morning may - or may not - be 'correlated' with the fact that once again the oil rig count declined 9 to 555 rigs, tracking oil's slide. This is the 12th weekly drop in the last 13 weeks to the lowest since June 2010.

"The future of the company seems very black," notes on trader as the bonds and stocks of Spanish renewbles form Abengoa lives up to its name and files for creditor protection, just as we warned was likely. With the stock crashing 70% to 28c and 4-month bonds trading at just 22c on the dollar, market participants face an almost total loss.. but, as we detailed previously, it is the American taxpayer - who thanks to Ex-Im Bank loans to keep this zombie alive - face losses of $230 million as Spain's Solyndra exposes another symptom of the Oligrachic ignorance of where the money comes from.

Here is a sight that will never be seen in the US: the CEO of the country's largest investment bank arrested and perp walked after accusation we was part of the nation's largest corruption scandal.

Just when you thought it was safe to hike rates, The Atlanta Fed takes an ax to its Q4 GDP forecast, smashing it to cycle lows following this morning's unexpected weakness in consumer spending.