Federal Reserve

"I am now reasonably satisfied the market situation has settled down... So I am comfortable with moving off zero soon..."

Amid souring bets on Brazil and the general malaise across EM, PIMCO has been dethroned as the king of emerging market bonds. A fund run by Ireland-incorporated Stone Harbor has overtaken PIMCO's EM Local Bond Fund as the world's largest emerging market fixed income fund by AUM as rollercoaster bets on Brazil and the departure of both El-Erian and Gross weighs on investor sentiment.

Sure, the stock market had a great October with the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumping by 8.5%, but the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street is too stark to ignore, and the Federal Reserve is about to pop the easy-money financial bubble.

If this weekend's gruesome terrorist attack on Paris ended up being hugely bullish for stocks, then two subsequent events, a stadium-evacuation scare in Hannover (where Angela Merkel was supposed to be present) and a raid in north Paris which left several dead in the ongoing manhunt against the alleged ISIS mastermind, appear to have but some question into if not stocks then algos whether a rising wave of terrorist hatred across Europe is truly what central bankers need to unleash more QE. That said, we expect the current weakness to last only until the traditional USDJPY carry ramp pushes stocks traditionally higher.

Having recently shown The Fed to go 6 for 6 in a day of FedSpeak failures to spark animal spirits, it appears this is actually not so unusual for some members of The Fed. As WSJ found, when it comes to watching the Federal Reserve, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on Atlanta and San Francisco but for 9 of the policy-makers, economists rank their 'FedSpeak' as less than useful... with soon-to-be-replaced Kockerlakota the least useful Fed speaker of all...

Economists have been consistently over-estimating the strength of the economy this year. The magnitude of their misses is not particularly worrisome but volatility measures and the recent record number of consecutive negative readings are suggesting that economists’ models are losing their grasp on the state of the economy.

Ten years after Symantec paid $13.5bn for Veritas, Carlyle Group agreed in August to buy the data-storage business for just $8 billion (the biggest LBO of the year). Of course, the buyout deal made sense when the cost of funding was negligible and The Fed had your back but, as Bloomberg reports, amid soaring borrowing costs, banks have pulled the $5.5 billion debt offering for Veritas signaling a clear end to the reach-for-yield, nothing is a problem, bond market's risk appetite.. and if 'growthy' deals like this are being killed, what does that say for distressed bets on Energy M&A deals?

Once you examine the finer details, it quickly becomes clear that there are five key reasons that the Fed is unlikely to raise rates anytime soon.

"New banknotes were being delivered daily in boxcar loads. In October 1923, banknote circulation amounted to 2,496,822,909,038,000,000 and everyone called for more. It is this last fact that is most telling, that every group believed that the solution was simply more money. They failed to grasp that what was needed was to simply cease all manipulation of the system and let the free market return. Their failure assured that the only possible outcome was the collapse of the system."

The notion of free markets, mechanisms where buyers and sellers can meet to exchange securities or various kinds of goods, in which each participant has access to the same information, is a fallacy. Transparency in trading across global financial markets is a fallacy. Not only are markets rigged by, and for, the biggest players, so is the entire political-financial system.

The allure of ill-gotten oil money remains strong. The lull in drilling has given oil companies more time to scrutinize their operations -- and their losses. As Bloomberg reports, during booms "they are moving at such a rapid pace there’s not a lot of auditing and inventorying going on," said Gary Painter, sheriff in Midland County, Texas, in the oil-rich Permian Basin; but "whenever it slows down, they start looking for stuff and find out it never got delivered or it got delivered and it’s gone." From raw crude sucked from wells to expensive machinery that disappears out the back door, drillers from Texas to Colorado are struggling to stop theft that has only worsened amid tens of thousands of lost roughneck jobs.

The odds of a December rate hike have slipped in recent days from over 70% intraday to 64.0% today as, while economists remain convinced that rates will rise in December, traders appear a little less confident. One of the most outspoken - having doubted The Fed (and questioned the economy's ability to handle even a 25bps rate hike) since Spring - DoubleLine Capital co-founder Jeffrey Gundlach said on Sunday that the Fed may hesitate to raise rates given rocky economic and financial conditions making it clear, as Reuters reports, "certainly [a Fed] No-Go is more likely than most people think. These markets are falling apart."

Editor’s Note: The tragic events in Paris, terrorism and war throughout the world, show geopolitical risk remains high.  These risks will likely impact economies and financial markets and will see continuing safe haven demand for gold. “The future is uncertain and gold is the most effective insurance against that.”

The flip side of falling interest rates is rising bond prices. Bonds are in a ferocious bull market. It's gobbling up capital like the Cookie Monster jamming tollhouses into his maw.

The global economy is in dire straits and China can push it into a fierce recession!