Deutsche Bank

The LBMA wants to boost transparency and invited the market to suggest improvements including considering a new electronic platform that may lower trading costs and improve efficiency.

• Great News: China’s GDP Growth Beats Forecasts as Stimulus Supports Spending (BBG)
• Oh wait, maybe not: China GDP: Deflategate Comes to Beijing (WSJ)
• Actually, definitely not: Shanghai rebar falls to record low after weak China GDP (Reuters)
• But who cares: European Shares Gain on Earnings as Bonds Drop, Metals Decline (BBG)

The key overnight event was the much anticipated, goalseeked and completely fabricated Chinese economic data dump, which was both good and bad depending on who was asked: bad, in that at 6.9% it was below the government's 7.0% target and the lowest since Q1 2009, and thus hinting at "more stimulus" especially since industrial production (5.7%, Exp. 6.0%) and fixed spending also both missed; it was good because it beat expectations of 6.8% by the smallest possible increment, and set the tone for much of Europe's trading session, even if Asia shares ultimately closed largely in the red over skepticism over the authenticity of the GDP results. Worse, and confirming the global economy is now one massive circular reference, China accused the Fed's rate hike plans for slowing down its economy, which is ironic because the Fed accused China's economy for forcing it to delay its rate hike.

Moments ago, Europe's largest bank by assets and by gross notional derivatives, announced a raft of high-level management changes as part of an anticipated and sweeping restructuring of key divisions and senior-level committees. As WSJ reports, Colin Fan, the investment-banking co-head responsible for securities trading, will resign effective Monday. But the most profound change is that Deutsche Bank will split its investment bank into two pieces: one, focused on mergers and other deals, corporate finance and transaction banking services such as cash management, and the other on trading and global markets.

If you needed further evidence that global growth and trade are in a veritable tailspin, look no further than the latest trade data from India, which shows that both exports and imports fell by 25% in September. That's ok though, we're sure it's nothing another rate cut can't fix...

News That Matters

As we have warned numerous times - and any trader old enough to have actually lived through a credit cycle can attest to - there is only so much releveraging shareholder-friendly exuberance firms can do before the company's balance sheet becomes questionable. That inflection point has come for US equities. The deterioration of balance-sheet health is "increasingly alarming" and will only worsen if earnings growth continues to stall amid a global economic slowdown, according to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan's Eric Beinstein warns "the benefit of lower yields for corporate issuers is fading." The weakness is widespread as BlackRock fears "you’ll continue to see some land mines out there."

"The business environment deteriorated further in the third quarter. However, the cost reduction actions we took in previous quarters and the acceleration of our transformation program enabled us to protect our financial performance in what is shaping up to be the most severe downturn in the industry for decades.... In light of conservative customer budgets for next year, we are therefore entering another period during which we will continually adjust resources in line with activity, as the recovery now appears to be delayed."

Capital Economics "expects gold could hit $1,200 before the end of this year, rising to $1,400 by the end of 2016”

Between a convoluted, self-referential reaction function and a cacophony of Fed speakers, the market simply can no longer process the FOMC's message and with that in mind, we bring you RBS’ Alberto Gallo who asks if perhaps we have reached “peak Fedspeak”.

The cyclical fallout from the Great Financial Crisis and the secular deflationary “D’s” of excess Debt, tech Disruption, aging Demographics have been the major catalysts for deflation.

While the US bond market, if not equities, is enjoying the day off on a day in which there is no economic data just more Fed speakers including the Fed's Evans who on Friday uttered what may be the dumbest thing a central planner has ever said, the week's macro docket starts in earnest on Tuesday when China releases much anticipated September trade data. Here are the key events for the rest of the week.

On Friday we said that "it is certain that any volume reductions by Glencore will be promptly taken advantage of by Glencore's competitors, because in a global deleveraging and commodity supercycle repricing, he who cooperates while others defect, always loses the game theory."And just as expected, overnight the world's second biggest mining company, Rio Tinto, warned that it will not cut copper production, saying it would be illogical to hold back output and leave space in the market for higher-cost rivals.

Just when you thought the M&A boom is over after a surge in bond yields that Goldman has repeatedly dubbed as "recessionary", and which will make the debt cost of any funding so high that there is barely any room for execution error, moments ago as had been extensively leaked previously, private Dell announced it would acquire tech giant EMC in a deal valued roughly $67 billion, while maintaining VMWare as a publicly-traded corporation. Good luck with raising the tens of billions in debt the deal will require: our best wish to Barclays, BofA, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, RBC who will all be underwriting the required debt financing to Dell.