Archive - Jan 2016 - Story

As reported previously, in addition to celebrating the new year, starting January 1, Texans also celebrated a new open-carry gun law which took effect in the new year. As a result, Texans should get accustomed to sights such as this one which over the coming weeks and months will become increasingly recurring.

With hedge fund short positions near record highs and speculators at their least bullish in almost five years, oil prices have spurted higher in the early trading as the diplomatic gloves come off in The Middle East. Despite record levels of crude inventory around the world, WTI Crude is trading above $38, up over 3% from its $37.07 close on New Year's Eve. Algos ran the stops above last week's highs ($38.32) but for now prices are not as excited as many would have expected. Brent, for now, is outperforming and trade 45c rich to WTI.

Growing debt faster than your energy supply has hard limits. Gail Tverberg explains the tight correlation between the rates of GDP growth and growth in energy supply. For decades, energy has been becoming more costly to obtain, and instead of accepting lower GDP growth, we have been using debt to fund further energy exploration and extraction. That strategy has diminishing returns, Tverberg warns. And we are close to the moment of reckoning: "I’m afraid what it means is that at some point there’s got to be a discontinuity. Something has got to break."

"We believe that diplomatic engagement and direct conversations remain essential in working through differences and we will continue to urge leaders across the region to take affirmative steps to calm tensions," US officials said on Sunday on the heels of Saudi Arabia's decision to cut diplomatic ties with Iran following the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric and the firebombing of the Saudi embassy in Tehran. The response from Riyadh: "enough is enough."

What happens when radioactive byproduct from the Manhattan Project comes into contact with an “underground fire” at a landfill? Surprisingly, no one actually knows for sure; but residents of Bridgeton, Missouri, near the West Lake and Bridgeton Landfills - just northwest of the St. Louis International Airport - may find out sooner than they’d like. For now, it’s startlingly apparent no one knows exactly what’s happening - though the smoldering below the surface doesn’t cease and floodwaters continue to rise.

Outspoken UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who has received numerous death threats during his tenure as a European parliamentarian, spoke for the first time last night about being the victim of an assassination attempt after his car was sabotaged, causing a terrifying motorway crash. As The Daily Mail reports, Farage careered off a French road after a wheel on his Volvo came loose while he was driving from Brussels back to his home in Kent. When the police arrived at the scene, they told him that the nuts on all of the wheels had been deliberately unscrewed...

If 2015 was the year in which no investment strategy worked, 2016 is looking like the year in which all economic policies fail.

Another possible step would be to reduce short-term interest rates below zero if needed to provide additional accommodation... Could negative interest rates be a policy response that the Federal Reserve could choose to employ in a future crisis? ... these are transitional problems, but they might be sufficient to make a move to negative rates difficult to implement on short notice.

As we start the new year, there is a debate raging within the market.  No the debate isn’t whether there is weakness in the manufacturing economy, that is taken as a given, especially after Friday’s awful Chicago Purchasing Manager number of 42.9. Instead, the debate boils down to this: 'bears' believe the manufacturing economy and the service economy act in conjunction with each other – that one cannot turn, without the other; 'bulls' view each segment of the economy as relatively independent and they highlight the size of the service economy relative to the manufacturing. The answer lies in the missing cog - the 'wealth' economy.

"Lately, I must admit that my hostility towards your political ilk has ramped up, pretty dramatically...Everything that modern liberalism accomplishes is accomplished at the barrel of a government rifle...What angers me the most about you is the eagerness with which you allow the incremental enslavement to occur. I have the utmost respect for a slave who is continuously seeking a path to freedom. What I cannot stomach is a free man who is continuous seeking a path to servitude by willingly trading his freedom for the false sense of security that government will provide."

if companies are being honest about their intentions to raise wages, then US corporate profitability is about to fall off a cliff. As the chart below from JPM shows, the difference between "intentions to raise prices" less "intentions to raise wages" - a proxy for operating margins - has not been this negative in the 21st century.

"Essentially central banks, by unfairly inflating asset prices have compressed risk like a spring to unfairly tight levels. Unfortunately, the market is aware the price of risk is not correct, but they can’t fight it, and everyone is forced to crowd into the same trade. By manipulating markets they have also reduced investors’ inherent conviction by rendering fundamentals less relevant."

- Bank of America

Rail volumes provides a mixed picture of the US economy at this point: oil & gas and mining-related sectors are taking a real beating, some consumer sectors seem to be holding up and there are signs of weakness in the housing sector. 2016 should witness some type of a resolution here.

Ever since it started making complicated bets against some leveraged ETFs, Miller’s Catalyst Macro Strategies Funds has since grown from $500,000 in assets at the start of the year to about $170 million. It achieved a more than 50 percent return this year, placing it far ahead of its competitors.