OPEC

With just 72 hours to go until Yellen decides to soak up to $800 billion in liquidity, suddenly we have China and the Emerging Market fracturing, commodities plunging, and junk bonds everywhere desperate to avoid being the next to liquidate.

Following a miss in retail sales (if slight beat in core spending), the final key economic update the Fed will look at before its "first rate hike in nine years" meeting next week is today's Producer Price Inflation report which rose 0.3%, above the expected unchanged print and even higher compared to October's -0.4% decline. The report showed that while the decline in energy prices continued as expected, sliding 0.6% in the Final Demand Goods category, there was a surprising pickup in final demand services, which rebounded by 0.5% driven by Trade which rose 1.2% from the prior month, driven by an unexpected pickup in margins for apparel, jewelry, footwear, and accessories retailing.

'As goes oil, so goes the US equity market' appears to bethe new mantra. Just as yesterday's pump-and-dump tracked oil, so in the pre-market, WTI Crude plunged back to fresh 7-year lows after IEA warned that the oil glut will worsen, with prices lower for longer as demand remains subdued through at least 2017. This in turn sent US equities tumbling with Dow futures down 200 points (down 330 from Thursday highs).

It was a relatively calm overnight session in which European stocks wobbled modestly, Japan was up, China was down following its weakest fixing since 2011 as the PBOC continues to aggressively devalue since the SDR inclusion (stoking concerns capital outflows are once again surging), EM stocks stocks were weak and the dollar was unchanged ahead of today's retail sales data and next week's Fed meeting, and then suddenly everything snapped.

It's a bad time to be in the commodities business. Crude is in a veritable tailspin as an increasingly disjointed OPEC ramps production to three-year highs and thanks to a worldwide deflationary supply glut, the Bloomberg commodities index is sitting near its lowest levels of the 21st century portending doom and gloom for prices across the entire commodities complex. On Thursday, we get the latest round of desperate cost saving measures as oil major ConocoPhillips slashes capex by some 25% and looks to raise $2.3 billion from asset sales.

The latest confirmation that the oil cartel formerly known as OPEC is effectively non-existent, came a little over an hour ago when in its latest November monthly report, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries reported that total monthly crude output for the member nations rose to 31.695 million barrels per day, the highest amount produced in three and a half years.

With prices below $50, what is a stripper to do?

Andy Hall's Astenbeck hedge-fund lost 9.7% in November, bringing 2015 losses to more than 26%. As a result of capital losses and mounting redemptions, Astenbeck’s assets under management fell to $2.4 billion, down from $3 billion at the start of the year and nearly $5 billion less than three years ago.

Oil tanker rates soared to the highest in seven years amid an acceleration in the number of bookings and signs that the ships are being delayed when unloading due to a lack of space in on-land storage tanks. This means that day rates for 2 million-barrel carrying ships sailing to Japan from Saudi Arabia, the industry’s benchmark route, surged to $111,359, the highest since July 2008,

After 10 weeks of inventory builds, API reports a 1.9mm barrel draw (hugely missing DOE expectations of a 1.3mm build). The initial reaction was a knee-jerk higher by 25c, but we note that Cushing saw a 614k barrel build (5th week in a row) and is perhaps the more crucial storage level to montori. As one trader noted, "OPEC wants to produce as much as they want," and as global land (and sea) storage fills, so "$35 is clearly a level of interest."

The day of reckoning has arrived for the oil price. After a year of "Oil Price Crash" in October the world managed record production of 97.09 Mbpd. Production momentum built in the period of high price, 2007 to 2014, is proving very difficult to switch off. It must be switched off and it seems to me the most likely scenario is sharply lower oil price in the near term.

How many times were we told that an OPEC decision was "priced in" - well it wasn't. WTI is now down 15% from pre-OPEC and has crashed through the $37 level for the first time since Feb 2009... time to catch a falling knife (again), or fold on all those 'recovery' bets?

If you're in the commodities business, this is “not the time for courage” (to borrow a classic Gartman-ism). In the latest example of just how bad things have gotten, Anglo American - the world’s fifth largest miner - just kitchen sink-ed it, announcing a sweeping restructuring, a massive round of layoffs, and a dividend cut. The company will reduce its assets by some 60% while headcount will be cut by a whopping 85,000 or, nearly two thirds.