recovery

"The impotence of monetary policy in boosting growth and staving off deflationary pressures has become painfully apparent, especially when it is acting in isolation and when a large number of countries are resorting to the same limited playbook."

Never have markets carried so much risk. And never have markets been as vulnerable to an abrupt change in perceptions with regard to central banker competence, effectiveness and capabilities. At the minimum, global markets will function poorly, but risk is now high for a disorderly – Party Crashing - "run" on financial markets, as faith in central banking begins to wane.

The results from Portugal's elections are beginning to trickle in and according to exit polls, Coelho's coalition has prevailed. According to Bloomberg, the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho has won 38%-43% of vote and 108-116 seats.

With supply set to increase meaningfully over the next few years, JPMorgan sees a buyer's market until 2020 with limited new long term contracts being signed and renewal of existing contracts post expiry likely to have more price diversification (i.e. more Henry hub component) and offtake/diversion flexibility. A recent trip to Asia identified 10 key themes reinforcing their bearish outlook on the LNG market for the rest of the decade.

$13 trillion in market losses in just one quarter would be very hard to make up for even in very favorable circumstances. We have no such circumstances. We’ve built our very lives on squeezing China et al for 27 years, and issuing more debt as if there’s no tomorrow - sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy -, and now we’ve belatedly realized that there’s a time limit on that model. But hey, by all means, it’s your money, and it’s your life, so do keep on betting on that recovery, and the return to ‘normal’, whatever that once was. Put it all on red. Go crazy! You do risk becoming a lonely crowd though. Meanwhile, those of us down here with our feet planted in the real earth have just this one question: “How bad can this get, and how fast?”.

The sequence of events leading up the French Revolution are likely unfamiliar to most. Yet money printing and a debauched French currency played no small part in those events. As a sequel to “Shorting the Federal Reserve”, 720 Global aims to provide an historical example of excessive money printing which lead to financial crisis, and ultimately the revolution of a major sovereign nation. More than a history lesson, this article effectively illustrates the road on which the U.S. and many other nations currently travel. The story relayed in this article is not a forecast for what may happen but a simple reminder of what has repeatedly happened in the past.

“We got a catered meal of hot dogs and hamburgers as our thanks while others, I’m sure, got big bonuses."

According to a follow report, it is only a matter of time before far more widespread crackdowns take place within the auto industry where emissions fraud now appears as systemic as that of the global banking sector.

The poor jobs report weighed on the dollar, but the greenback recovered as the session progressed.  It is not clear the jobs report was a game changer.  Stay tuned.  

Since the start of the depression in December 2007, the US economy has added 1.5 million waiters and bartenders and lost 1.4 million manufacturing workers.

If you thought the headline jobs print was bad, wait till you see this.

"Inconceivable." With the total destruction of the "faith" in The Fed's pr0mised "recovery," stocks and bond yields are collapsing. A glance at the crash in fed reigional surveys should have given the market a hint (and credit did) but US equity markets are in free-fall and gold and silver are surging. Treasuries rallied hard on the bursting of the faith bubble with 10Y yields plunged back under 2.00% and 30Y yields broke below the 200-day moving average.

For those eager to push aside the endless government propaganda and concerned about the rapidly deteriorating economy, here is a list of the Top 20 biggest private-sector job cut announcements of 2015. Our advice: for anyone who is still employed at any of the following corporations, if you can find a job elsewhere (because the "recovery" and all), do it before you too become a seasonally-adjusted pink-slip.

How many of us are bored to tears with the Fed’s Hamlet act on raising rates, and yet have been staring at this debate for so long that we have convinced ourselves that we have a meaningful view on what will transpire, even though it’s a decision where we have zero investing edge and unknowable risk/reward odds. The hardest thing in the world for talented people is to avoid turning a low edge and odds opportunity into an unreasonably high conviction bet simply because we want it so badly and have analyzed the situation so smartly. In both poker and investing, we brutally overestimate the edge and odds associated with merely ordinary opportunities once we’ve been forced by circumstances to sit on our hands for a while. Investment discipline suffers under the weight of dullness and low conviction in at least four distinct ways here in the Golden Age of the Central Banker...

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