Market Conditions

"The helicopter. Rather than buying assets, central banks drop money on the street. Or even better, in a more modern and civilised fashion, credit our bank accounts!" Yes, "even better!"...

What most investors do not realize currently is they could go to "cash" today and in five years will likely be better off. However, since making such a suggestion is strictly "taboo" because one might "miss some upside," it becomes extremely important for measures to be put into place to protect investment capital from the coming downturn.  Of course, since Wall Street does not make fees on investors holding cash, maybe there is another reason they are so adamant that you remain invested all the time.

According to what is arguably the most respected polling organization in the US, consumer confidence has crashed to the lowest level in a year. On the other hand, according to a tax-exempt research organization, consumer confidence is not only the highest it has been in 2015, but it practically the highest since 2007.Someone is lying, we leave it up to readers to decide who.

The best headline to summarize what happened in the early part of the overnight session was the following from Bloomberg: "Asian stocks extend global rally on stimulus bets." And following the abysmal data releases from the past three days confirming that the latest centrally-planned attempt to kickstart the global economy has failed, overnight we got even more bad data, first in the form of Australia's trade deficit, and then Germany's factory orders which bombed, and which as Goldman said "seems to reflect genuine weakness in China and emerging markets in general and this will weigh on the German manufacturing sector."

Several months ago activist Nelson Peltz may lost his proxy fight against DuPont, but in retrospect he may be counting his lucky stars as moments ago the company became only the latest chemical giant to admit the gruesome reality of the global economic slump driven by a historic USD surge, when it not only cut its second half operating EPS from $0.75 to $0.40, in the process also slashing full year operating EPS from a prior guidance of $3.10 to just $2.75 mostly blaming Brazil, but in an even bigger shocker also reported that its CEO and Chairman Ellen Kullman is retiring from the company effective October 16.

Without government intervention the “invisible hand” of the world oil market will simply bankrupt US shale companies and with it destroys the US shale oil industry.

But the question remains whether financial condition concern should manifest itself through unemployment and inflation dual mandate forecasts or be a separate consideration all together? To me, the danger in the latter is it turns central bankers into traders and market timers and that is something they are unlikely to have trained for

When you tell people in self denial the market could drop 40% in a few months, they think you are crazy. They declare this could never happen. They would get out of the market before it would fall vertically. Their memories are conveniently short as their normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance blind them to what happened over three months in 2008/2009. We wonder how many willfully ignorant investors can handle a 50% to 70% haircut in their 401k, especially if they are over 50 years old. We wonder how much angrier the populace will become when the current recession results in more job losses, bankruptcies and revelations of Wall Street malfeasance. Beware of the bear.

As WSJ reports, "Bank of America Corp. is expected to announce layoffs in its global banking and global markets unit as early as Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter."

Today's most popular hedge fund strategy among institutional investors globally is "Alternative Global Macro Funds". Also known as a “go anywhere” investment style, active managers employ opportunistic trading tactics across asset classes, financial instruments, and geographic regions. Like many liquid alts, global macro funds grew rapidly following the financial crisis as investors looked for strategies that could diversify their portfolios in the midst of volatility in the global marketplace and historically high sector correlations against the S&P 500, thereby improving their risk-return profiles. Ultimately, success in this classification resides in selecting the right active manager given the strategy’s wide dispersion of returns.

The Fed’s policy of forward guidance and radical transparency is not working. It turns out that letting the market peer over its shoulder as it makes monetary policy sausage is, in some ways, worse than the opaque process that existed prior to the arrival of Bernanke and Yellen. It pulls back the curtain and shows the human, error prone side of the Fed. Every time the Fed’s dots move, it is an admission of failure and undermines the very confidence it was trying to inspire.

"It was our Black Monday. The big question is when will they come back, because managers have been really quite reliant on Sama for business in recent years."

When you tie the reflexivity problem in with the fact that the excessive use of counter-cyclical policy is leading to the creation of ever larger asset bubbles by effectively short circuiting the market's natural ability to purge speculative excess and correct the misallocation of capital, what you get is a never-ending loop whereby the consequences of unconventional monetary policy serve as the excuse for doubling and tripling down on those same policies.

When risk sold off last week in the wake of the Fed’s so-called “clean relent,” it signalled at best a policy mistake and at worst the loss of any and all credibility. Tonight, Yellen gets a do-over.

Just three days ago after looking at the latest CAT retail sales, we asked in stunned amazement "What On Earth Is Going On With Caterpillar Sales?"  We now know the answer.