Yen

Here comes today's main event, the July non-farm payrolls - once again the "most important ever" as the number will cement whether the Fed hikes this year or punts once again to the next year, and which consensus expects to print +225K although the whisper range is very wide: based on this week's ADP report, NFP may easily slide under 200K, while if using the non-mfg PMI as an indicator, a 300K+ print is in the cards. At the end of the day, it will be all in the hands of the BLS' Arima X 12 seasonal adjusters, and whatever goalseeked print the labor department has been strongly urged is the right one.

A sample of charts currently on our radar

In many ways the overnight session has been a mirror image of yesterday, with the dollar accelerating its Lockhart-commentary driven rise, which curiously has pushed ES higher perhaps as a result of more USDJPY correlation algos being active and various other FX tracking pairs. Indeed, the weak yen is all that mattered in Japan, where the Nikkei 225 (+0.5%) rose amid JPY weakness, despite opening initially lower as index heavyweight Fast Retailing (-4.5%) reported a 2nd consecutive monthly decline in Uniqlo sales. Elsewhere in mirror images, China slid 1.7%, undoing about half of yesterday's 3.7% jump, and is now down for 4 of the past 5 days.

Yesterday afternoon's meltup short-squeeze in China - after regulators announced their latest restrictions on short-selling - has stalled in the early trading tonight following The IMF's decision to delay inclusion of Yuan in the SDR pending a review in September 2016. Though this will be a disappointment to the Chinese, the door is still open though given waringse from BMW and Toyota over "normalizing" auto sales, the market problems may be morphing quickly into economic problems.

Japan's all important real wages, even those including bonuses and special payments, once again failed to keep up with inflation, and in June crashed by a whopping 2.9% reflecting a 0.5% yoy increase in the CPI excluding imputed rent. As the chart below shows, there has now been 24 consecutive months without a single Y/Y monthly increase in real wages. What's worse is that when one adjusts the inflationary surge from the consumption tax hike last April, which has now been fully anniversaried and is no longer part of the base effect, this was the largest decline in Japan's real wages since December 2009, or the biggest monthly plunge in 6 years!

Will the Japanese “monetary perpetuum mobile” ever get questioned by financial markets?

Back in the 1960s, Alan Greenspan wrote a well-known essay that to this day is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the present-day monetary and economic system (which is a kind of “fascism lite” type of statism, masquerading as capitalism) and especially the almost visceral hate etatistes harbor toward gold. Greenspan’s essay is entitled “Gold and Economic Freedom”, and as the title already suggests, the two are intimately connected.

The SNB reported a record loss, but the real meaning and implication is not what most are claiming.  See why.

Regardless of where one thinks the dollar is going in the long-term, here is a discussion of where it will likely go in the short-term.  

Authorities pushing currency devaluation as a cure for their stagnating economies might want to study Frederic Bastiat's insight into the eventual cost and consequences: "For it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa.”

Why I've come to thinking that Kyle Bass' short JGB premise may well be wrong

"The rise of China’s currency on global markets is arguably the most significant development in currency trading since the introduction of the euro in 1999."

Just as Japan thought they could go back to pre-Plaza Accord growth rates by holding on to the old ways in the 1990s, the Chinese will expect the growth miracle to return in 2016 with the “right” policies. It will not. It is all a mirage though. Just as in Japan, the Chinese will not allow the market process to do its magic to get the economy back on a stable footing. Draconian measures to stop the recent stock market rout are a clear testimony of that. In other words, the Chinese economy will resemble that of Japan, and it will do so very soon, if it is not already there.  China is heading straight into a zero growth environment, and will be mired there for years to come.

It all started in China, where as we noted previously, the Shanghai Composite plunged by 8.5% in closing hour, suffering its biggest one day drop since February 2007 and the second biggest in history. The Hang Seng, while spared the worst of the drubbing, was also down 3.1%. There were numerous theories about the risk off catalyst, including fears the PPT was gradually being withdrawn, a decline in industrial profits, as well as an influx in IPOs which drained liquidity from the market. At the same time, Nikkei 225 (-0.95%) and ASX 200 (-0.16%) traded in negative territory underpinned by softness in commodity prices.

Deflation is back on the front burner and it's going to destroy all of the careful central planning and related market manipulation of the past 6 years. Clear signs from the periphery indicate that a destructive deflationary pulse has been unleashed. After years of suppression, the forces of reality are threatening to overwhelm our managed global ""markets"'. And it's about damn time.