Real estate

"We are sellers of risk SPX 2050-2100, DXY>100. Terror/geopolitics can keep ZIRP for longer, but bullish FMS indicates big EPS needed for sustained new risk highs."
- BOfA

"Japan’s experience suggests that QE has its limits, and could bring a range of side effects. These include years of tepid growth, the reduction in secondary trading liquidity, an increase in asset ownership by central banks (the BoJ now owns half of the national ETF market), potential formation of asset bubbles and social problems like inequality."

The flip side of falling interest rates is rising bond prices. Bonds are in a ferocious bull market. It's gobbling up capital like the Cookie Monster jamming tollhouses into his maw.

The institutional academic system is broken. We need less systemic, traditional education that only provides knowledge of low utility and more alternative education that provides the right high-utility knowledge to thrive during today's global currency wars.

If it looks like a recession, walks like a recession and quacks like a recession, it’s a recession.

There’s no reason to sweat a drop in the gold price or cheer a rise.

“The bubble may already have burst” for the most expensive homes, Barber said. Now, "36 percent of all properties currently on the market across prime central London are being marketed at a lower price than they were originally listed at, with the average reduction in price being 8.5 percent."

China has given the green light to more than 150 coal power plants so far this year despite falling coal consumption, flatlining production and existing overcapacity. Modelling this expansion, Greenpeace EnergyDesk suggests that this would cause 6,100 premature deaths a year — that’s 150,000 over a 24-year operating life.

Washington’s capacity to foster crony capitalist larceny and corruption never ceases to amaze. But as we recently noted, Wall Street’s shameless thievery from US taxpayers is about to get a whole new definition.

"The ECB’s bond buying programme has created favourable financing conditions and provides member states with an incentive to defer much-needed budget consolidation and structural reforms. However, further structural reforms to strengthen markets and competitiveness are crucial for a self-sustaining economic recovery. In addition, monetary policy is leading to a build-up of risks to financial stability which could pave the way for a new financial crisis."

On the heels of placing its third former employee at the Fed this year alone, Goldman explains why the market is wrong about inflation and whyv a handful of ex-Goldmanites will hike by 200bps in the next two years.

"It is a bloodbath. We’re at the highest point of fear and uncertainty now.... God only knows what’ll happen if oil doesn’t rebound. I try not to let that penetrate my mind."

The "unexpected" weakness among US consumption, that segment accountable for 70% of US GDP, continues this morning when moments ago Macy's reported a trifecta of weak data, reporting a miss on Q3 sales which came at $5.87 billion below the $6.1 billion expected, and down from the $6.2 billion a year ago, but also a plunge in comparable store sales which tumbled by 3.9%, far worse than the expected drop of -0.4%, and nearly three times as bad as the 1.4% drop a year ago.