Monetary Policy

"Unfortunately, an institution that was created to serve all Americans has been hijacked by the very bankers it regulates.” 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders said in an op-ed on Wednesday that a full independent audit of the Federal Reserve is necessary “to reign in Wall Street."

The Fed will never succeed in its attempt to manage inflation and unemployment by varying interest rates. This is because it and its economists do not accept the relationship between, on one side, the money it creates and the bank credit its commercial banks issue out of thin air, and on the other the disruption unsound money causes in the economy. This has been going on since the Fed was created, which makes the question as to whether the Fed was right to raise interest rates recently irrelevant.

The market is well 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 central bank (CB) intervention. By manipulating markets they have also reduced investors’ inherent conviction by rendering fundamentals less relevant, creating a highly unstable (fragile) situation that breaks violently when a sufficient catalyst causes risk to rise – overly crowded positioning meets a market with little conviction. Catalysts From BofAML's global equity derivatives desk's vantage point, it becomes clear that the biggest visible risk to financial markets is a loss of confidence in this omnipotent CB put.

In an unexpected turn of events, the disappearance of not just synthetic but very physical dollars has hit one region much harder and much faster than we expected. Africa.

Having anticipated 2015 as the starting point to a turn in volatility for the last two years, BofAML warns that from here on, based on the 'Economics of Volatility framework', they expect to see a rising trend in equity volatility levels, a trend that could last 1-2 years, transporting us from the low volatility regime of the last 3 years towards a sustained high volatility regime.

2015 has witnessed several events that had, and will have, negative repercussions on individual freedom. Orwellian totalitarianism is increasingly creeping into our everyday lives. How much more intrusive will the violations of our liberties become and for how long will the establishment get away with this? With regards to the financial system, no real solution was found to issues such as those in the euro zone. Furthermore, the financial system as a whole once again got deeper into debt. For how much longer can central banks and governments continue kicking the can down the road without any real reform?

Timing a crash can be a fool's errand, and fortunately such efforts are largely irrelevant if you are tail hedging (though they are quite relevant if you aren't). But this doesn't mean that exercises in timing are without merit. Without a doubt (or at least with over 99% confidence), bad things happen with increasing expectation when conditioning on higher Q ratios ex ante. Factoring time into the equation, and again based on history, the confidence interval around the median time would point to an expectation that the crash should commence right about now.

With the market now back to oversold conditions and redemptions complete, it is now or never for the traditional “Santa Rally.” Statistically speaking, the odds are high that the market will muster a rally over the next couple of weeks. While the short-term trends are indeed still bullishly-biased, the longer-term analysis (monthly) reveals a more dangerous picture emerging.

The first Fed rate hike in seven years was supposed to trigger a powerful equity rally as the bulls expected money to pour out of bonds into stocks; especially into the cyclicals. Unfortunately for the equity bulls,, as Mizuho's Steve Ricchiuto notes, this time things are different and instead of the Fed rate hike triggering the traditional Santa Claus rally; it looks like the FOMC is actually the Grinch. The key message delivered by the Fed though the SEP, the DOTS and the Chair’s post meeting press conference is that this is the best the economy is going to get.

The only way to restore economic stability and avoid a major economic crisis is to end the Fed, or at least allow Americans to use alterative currencies. Some economists and policy makers claim that the way to stop the Federal Reserve from causing economic chaos is not to end the Fed but to force the Fed to adopt a “rules-based” monetary policy. Adopting rules-based monetary policy may seem like an improvement, but, because it still allows a secretive central bank to manipulate the money supply, it will still result in Fed-created booms and busts.

It has been a seesaw session with U.S. stock index futures following their dramatic buying burst in the last half hour of market trading yesterday by first rising, then falling, then rising again alongside European equities both driven almost tick for tick with even the smallest move in the carry trade of choice, the USDJPY, even as Asian shares trade near intraday highs after China’s leaders signaled they will take further steps to support growth.

The artificial lowering of interest rates sets a trap for businessmen by luring them into unsustainable business activities that are only exposed once the central bank tightens its interest rate stance.

“These kinds of ETFs don’t exist now. Using capital spending as a factor in deciding what goes in an ETF is quite unusual. I think the message from the BOJ is for us to go out and make them.”

The Fed seems to have been operating on the theory that their own views on the economy determine its path. But recently the Fed has taken the principle to an extreme never seen. Yellen may well have just hiked rates expecting, hoping, that the mere act of showing confidence in the economy would produce an economy worthy of confidence. The Fed has dominated the narrative for years now, investors and traders hanging on every word. Last week that started to change, the market repudiating the Fed’s outlook over a 48 hour period that must have produced some second guessing at the Fed.

In a weekend of very little macro newsflow facilitated by the release of the latest Star Wars sequel, the biggest political and economic event was the Spanish general election which confirmed the end of the PP-PSOE political duopoly at national level.  As a result, there was some early underperformance in SPGBs and initial equity weakness across European stocks, which however was promptly offset and at last check the Stoxx 600 was up 0.4% to 363, with US equity futures up nearly 1% after Friday's oversold drubbing. In other key news, the commodity slide continues with Brent Oil dropping to a fresh 11-year low as futures fell as much as 2.2% in London after a 2.8% drop last week.