For a week or two, the 'news' appeared to confirm the 'hope'; faith that Q1's dysphoria would emerge phoenix-like into Q2 euphoria as a 'hibernating' American public emerging from their weather-shelter and spent-spent-spent all their borrowed-borrowed-borrowed money. That ended last week! Despite the dramatically low volume liftathon in stocks since the FOMC meeting, major risk markets around the world are cracking. European bonds and stocks had a bad week, Treasuries rallied the most in 6 weeks, and the key to it all, USDJPY, slipped to 4 week lows. Why? As the chart below shows, US macro data is collapsing again (right on cue) and stands at 2-month lows... (and is the worst-performing macro nation in the world this year!)
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But it's not just top-down that's "broken"...
as Bottom-up Fundamentals are no longer the driver for credit
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or equity markets...
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Source: Bloomberg and Citi
Bonus Chart: Guess which country has the worst performing "Macro" this year relative to 'exuberant' expectations... USA USA USA
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