St. Louis Fed

"The Fed got it wrong when it predicted a drop in oil prices would be a big boon for the economy. It turned out the world had changed; the US has a lot of jobs connected to the oil industry."

- SF Fed President John Williams

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

Having been unable - or unwilling - to answer various reporters' questions with regard the 'odd' timing of The Fed's rate hike yesterday, we thought we would offer just one more chart to question the credibility of the central planners. Plucked from The Fed's own research, last week saw the largest surge in St.Louis Fed's Financial Stress Index (FSI) since August... and as Yellen proclaimed "all clear" the FSI was screaming "Danger" even louder than it did in September - when The Fed folded.

Over the weekend, in its latest quarterly presentation, the Bank of International Settlements made what may have been a very premature assessment that China is now contained. Judging by events in the past 24 hours, the reality is anything but.

With Draghi's Friday comments, which as we noted previously were meant solely to push markets higher, taking place after both Europe and Asia closed for the week, today has been a session of catch up for both Asian and Europe, with Japan and China up 1% and 0.3% respectively, and Europe surging 1.4%, pushing government bond yields lower as the dollar resumes its climb on expectations that Draghi will jawbone the European currency lower once more, which in turn forced Goldman to announce two hours ago that it is "scaling back our expectation for Euro downside."

As a result of the global commodity weakness, global stocks have fallen for the first time in six days as the sell-off in commodities continued, dragging both US equity futures and European stocks lower. However, putting this in context, last week the MSCI All Country World Index posted its biggest weekly gain in six weeks: alas, without a coincident rebound in commodity prices, it will be merely the latest dead cat bounce.

Ooops ...

Once again, the two major macroeconomic announcements over the weekend came from China, where we first saw an unexpected, if still to be confirmed, increase in FX reserves, and then Chinese trade data once again disappointed tumbling by 6.9% while imports plunged 18.8%. So how did the market react? The Shanghai Composite Index rose for a fourth day and reached its highest since August 20because more bad data means more easing from the PBOC, and just to give what few investors are left the green light to come back into the pool, overnight Chinese brokers soared after Chinese IPOs returned after a 5 month hiatus. Elsewhere, Stocks and currencies in emerging markets slump on prospect of higher U.S. borrowing costs before year-end and after data underscored slowdown in Asia’s biggest economy. Euro strengthens.

The most important question (which no one’s asking) that needs to be asked and addressed today is: With the Fed. all but signalling come heck or high-water – they’re raising in December. Do the global markets once again stand at the same ledge they did in early August? And if that is indeed so, the question that is self-evident is this: Are you now better equipped both psychologically, as well as strategically and tactically adroit to handle such gyrations? Or, have you focused on “fees” and “diversification” as expounded via today’s financial books with a tendency to just BTFD because it’s worked so well in the past regardless of forethought or angst?

"We are expecting that to happen. It would be normal, and that would not indicate poor macroeconomic performance.”

"What does this mean for investors? It means that at some point in the next year or two, I think we are all going to have a Henry Hill “Goodfellas” moment, where we think that we understand the conversation going on around us, where we think that we’re engaged with our social system in the usual way … and then everything will go sideways in a split second, and we will suddenly and with extreme clarity realize that we don’t understand anything at all except that we’re sitting at a table with a maniac."

When China was closed for one week at the end of September, something which helped catalyze the biggest weekly surge in US stocks in years, out of sight meant out of mind, and many (mostly algos) were hoping that China's problems would miraculously just go away. Alas after yesterday's latest trade data disappointment, it was once again China which confirmed that nothing is getting better with its economy in fact quite the contrary, and one quick look at the chart of wholesale, or factory-gate deflation, below shows that China is rapidly collapsing to a level last seen in 2009 because Chinese PPI plunged by 5.9% Y/Y, its 43rd consecutive drop - a swoon which is almost as bad as Caterpillar retail sales data.

"...declining velocity of money requires an ever rising level of monetary stimulus, which further depresses velocity of money, and requiring even further QEs. Also as countries compete in a diminishing pool by discounting currencies, global demand compresses, as current account surpluses in these countries rise not because of exports growing faster than imports but because imports decline faster than exports. This implies less demand for the global economy."

Most people believe that low oil prices are good for the United States, since the discretionary income of consumers will rise. There is the added benefit that Peak Oil must be far off in the distance, since “Peak Oilers” talked about high oil prices. Thus, low oil prices are viewed as an all around benefit. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth...

Despite the Fed continuing to kick this down the road, they continue to claim that we are in the middle of an ongoing recovery. There’s just one problem with that: things are getting worse than pre-crisis levels for millions of the poorest Americans. Possibly even more concerning is the fact that the amount of Americans living below the poverty line has soared since 2007.