RBS

"A smart politician can see that if somehow the consumption of middle-class householders keeps rising, if they can afford a new car every few years and the occasional exotic holiday, and best of all, a new house, they might pay less attention to their stagnant monthly paychecks. And one way to expand consumption, even while incomes stagnate, is to enhance access to credit."

"Australia has benefited from China’s growth over the past decades, but has become a less diversified and commodity dependent economy in the process. It is now exposed to China’s slowdown, and may be unable to re-engineer itself quickly enough to avoid the end of the commodity super-cycle. The worst is yet to come, in our view."

News That Matters

CATALAN SEPARATISTS CLOSE TO 50% OF VOTES: EXIT POLL

For those unaware, a fifth of Spain's GDP is voting on whether to secede from the country on Sunday. Here is everything you need to know about the Catalan black swan.

The problem with rushing to combat any sign of economic or financial market turmoil by resorting immediately to counter-cyclical policies is that the creative destruction that would normally serve to purge speculative excess isn’t allowed to operate and so, misallocated capital is allowed to linger from crisis to crisis, making the next boom and subsequent bust even larger than the last.

• Global Stocks Steady Despite China Slowdown (WSJ)
• European Recovery Saves Markets From China Gloom as Stocks Rally (BBG)
• Pope starts U.S. trip with tone of conciliation (Reuters)
• FBI Said to Recover Personal E-Mails From Hillary Clinton Server (BBG)
• Volkswagen chief faces grilling by board over diesel scandal (Reuters)
• 'European Detroit' Fear Grips VW Company Town as Scandal Widens (BBG)
• Berlin finds itself caught up in Volkswagen scandal (FT)

The first is that by keeping rates lower for even longer, the EM imbalances the Fed is worrying about will grow even larger, making it harder to exit stimulus; The second is a question on the value of forward guidance, after the Fed has repeatedly called for a hike and then backed out; The third is that the Fed may have limited, or no ammunition to react to the next potential shock, and that financial booms and busts may grow even larger over time.

The long awaited day is finally here by which we, of course, mean the day when nobody has any idea what the Fed will do, the Fed included. Putting today in perspective, there have been just about 700 rate cuts globally in the 3,367 days since the last Fed rate hike on June 29, 2006, while central banks have bought $15 trillion in assets, and vast portions of the world are now in negative interest rate territory.

It appears that the Fed no longer cares about doing the right thing for a very simple reason - the Fed no longer is worried about losing credibility. As the following chart showing the results of a survey of 150 institutional RBS clients and investors confirms, two -thirds already believe the Fed has lost credibility.

China's global meltdown-inducing "adjustment" continues unabated as fixed asset investment is weakest since 2000.

While we already knew that China was selling - and following the record selling of FX reserves in August, so does everyone else - an even more interesting question emerged: who is buying? Thanks to the WSJ we now know the answer: "A little-known New York hedge fund run by a former Yale University math whiz has been buying tens of billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury debt at recent auctions, drawing attention from the Treasury Department and Wall Street."

The chart below warrants the question: if an even modest slowdown in Europe's pace of credit creation resulted in unprecedented economic and social upheavals for the "southern" part of the continent, what happens when deleveraging finally hits one of the other places around the globe, be it the BRICs in particular, the EMs in general, or - heaven forbid - the US itself.

Before China’s bursting equity bubble grabbed international headlines, and before the PBoC’s subsequent devaluation of the yuan served notice to the world that things had officially gotten serious in the global currency wars, all anyone wanted to talk about when it came to China was a "hard landing." Now that the yuan devaluation has all but proven that China has landed, and landed hard, here are the five channels of contagion.