Global Economy

Magic ‘Super Mario’, the ECB’s monetary magician, disappointed markets yesterday as continuing and unprecedented monetary easing failed to prevent a sharp sell-off in stock and bond markets yesterday which has continued today.

Whether or not the Fed actually manages to raise rates in the real world is less important than maintaining USD hegemony. No empire has ever prospered or endured by weakening its currency.

But just like in 2008, the “experts” at the Federal Reserve are assuring all of us that everything is going to be just fine.  This is the exact same kind of mistake that the Federal Reserve made back in the late 1930s.  They thought that the U.S. economy was finally recovering, and so interest rates were raised.  That turned out to be a tragic mistake.

"How does all this play out? Timing is the key because as gamblers know there isn’t an endless stream of Martingale chips – even for central bankers acting in unison. One day the negative feedback loop on the real economy will halt the ascent of stock and bond prices and investors will look around like Wile E. Coyote wondering how far is down. But when? When does Martingale meet its inevitable fate? I really don’t know; I’m just certain it will."

Update: PSPP extended to March 2017 "or beyond", regional debt added to QE-eligible asset pool

Having just let everyone down with a less-than-spectacular 10 bps depo rate cut, Mario Draghi will now try to appease a spoiled market by announcing an expansion and/or an extension of PSPP. 

In Part I , readers were presented with the inherent criminality and fraud of the crime-euphemism known as “fractional-reserve banking.” In Part II , readers saw how the banking crime syndicate has exploited the opportunities that this institutionalized fraud presents and turned our entire financial system into a teetering Ponzi scheme about to suffer its final collapse.

The resistance to such an awakening is understandable if still lamentable. If recession is truly the looming assurance, as it increasingly appears, that would mean not just the end of the recovery but the end of “accommodation” as a given force. In other words, Janet Yellen and the OECD start backwards from their endpoint because of their unshakable faith in monetarism, a faith that actually defines how they think an economy does work (and how they produce the core assumptions in their models); should that path from here to there completely unravel, so, too, does their assumed power and philosophy.

"Emerging economies’ growth prospects look damaged in several respects. The central fact facing EM is the negative external shock that results from weak global trade growth and the collapse of Chinese import growth. This brings to an irreversible end the period of rapid, investment-led Chinese growth and strong global trade growth which had supplied EM with a once-in-a-generation positive external shock during the years between 2002 and 2013."

Overnight, Credit Suisse became the latest bank to join Goldman, JPM and increasingly more banks in predicting that 2016 will be a year in which investors will want to rotate out of equities. Specifically, the second largest Swiss bank said that it is "we reduce our equity weightings to our most cautious strategic stance since 2008 and take our mid-2016 S&P 500 target down to 2,150, the same as our end-2016 target." Here are the five reasons why CS just looked at the mounting wall of worry... and began to worry.

The world’s three largest economies, the US, China and Japan are already in recession. These countries represent nearly a third (29%) of global GDP. A stock market crash is coming.

The third stock market collapse of this century is near at hand. The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented commodity deflation and CapEx depression - the payback for 20 years of lunatic monetary stimulus and credit expansion. Yet the central banks are powerless to stop the payback. When the Fed announces a rate increase after 84 months of dithering next week in the face of GDP growth that has already decelerated to barely 1% this quarter the jig will be up. Monumental money printing has failed. Soon there will be no place to hide - not even in the Tremendous Ten.

"The exception to this global picture is in the US, where sector performance was a Pavlovian response to the much expected upcoming US rate rises (Utilities down and Basic Materials up). Global investors may be cyclically bearish, but US investors appear distracted by the historically cyclically positive message US rate rises might imply. We think this may prove a mistake."

There was something for everyone in last night's much anticipated Chinese PMI data, with the official number sliding to the lowest in over 3 years, suggesting the PBOC will need to do more stimulus and is thus bullish, while the unoffocial Caixin print rising to the highest since June, suggesting whatever the PBOC is doing is working, and is also bullish. Not unexpectedly, global stocks decided to take the bullish way out, and have risen across the globe led by Asia, where stocks rose as much as 1.8%, Europe also green and US equity futures up 10 points as of this writing.