Unemployment

As Europe grapples with political turmoil in the periphery stemming partly from voters' collective frustration with years of austerity, RBS takes a look at the history of European expenditure cuts and how they correlate to anti-government demonstrations, riots, assassinations, general strikes, and attempted revolutions. 

The allure of ill-gotten oil money remains strong. The lull in drilling has given oil companies more time to scrutinize their operations -- and their losses. As Bloomberg reports, during booms "they are moving at such a rapid pace there’s not a lot of auditing and inventorying going on," said Gary Painter, sheriff in Midland County, Texas, in the oil-rich Permian Basin; but "whenever it slows down, they start looking for stuff and find out it never got delivered or it got delivered and it’s gone." From raw crude sucked from wells to expensive machinery that disappears out the back door, drillers from Texas to Colorado are struggling to stop theft that has only worsened amid tens of thousands of lost roughneck jobs.

“The correction didn’t really solve a whole lot. You have all the same underlying market fissures in place, yet they will have lasted another six months... the odds are very high that the top was in May. I still think we’re looking at a cyclical bear market.”

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.

"We expect the economy to continue to face strong headwinds from higher interest rates, exigent financing conditions, high inflation, significant labor market deterioration, higher levels of inventory in key industrial sectors, higher public tariffs and taxes, high levels of household indebtedness, weak external demand, soft commodity prices, political uncertainty, and extremely depressed consumer and business confidence."

Greenspan’s phony disinflation success led to the Fed’s embrace of fully mobilized and massively intrusive monetary policy in the guise of the Great Moderation and the wealth effects theory of financial asset levitation. In due course, Greenspan’s self-aggrandizing but purely experimental forays of massive central bank intrusion in the financial markets were supplanted by the hard-core Keynesian model of Bernanke and Yellen. Alas, they operated under the grand illusion that a domestic wage and price spiral would tell them when the domestic GDP bathtub was filled to the full employment brim, and therefore when to lift their foot from the monetary accelerator. It never happened, and they never did. The era of Lite Touch monetary policy was by now ancient history.

Forget multiple millennia of ingrained religious zealotry, generations of ingrained hatred of 'infidel' invasions and resource exploitation, Bernie Sanders revealed, in an apparently entirely serious statement on CBS's Face The Nation that climate change will lead to terrorism, adding that the attack on Paris is an early example of this phenomenon playing out.

Where did Europe's Q3 weakness come from? It was broad based and pronounced led by Germany, the currency area’s exporting powerhouse, while Italian economic growth also eased. There were fresh contractions in Greece, Finland and Estonia, while Portugal’s economy stagnated.

We wonder: just how much "more exponential" will China's "strike chart" have to get before everyone else finally notices?

"the seasonally adjusted labour force estimates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for October sound incredible and they should be treated as just that: not credible.  Don't believe politicians as they gloat and claim credit. Don't believe the wire services when they report the estimates as fact....  The former chief statistician recently said the data was not worth the paper it was written on."

The most important thing Bullard said in his speech titled "Permazero" is that the the US may be entering a permanent period of lower inflation and interest rates. Wait, wasn't ZIRP and QE supposed to push the US economy, boost inflation and hike rates? Good to know 7 years later that the biggest monetary experiment in history did precisely the opposite of what it was supposed to achieve.

The housing recovery without mortgage originations is coming to its inevitable conclusion.

• Stock futures little changed as Yellen comments awaited (Reuters)
• Draghi stimulus hint underpins stocks, knocks euro (Reuters)
• Black Friday's Losing Its Mojo and Retailers Might Be Relieved (BBG)
• Macy’s Fights Downward Spiral With Bet on Off-Price Backstage Stores (WSJ)
• Greece Comes to a Standstill as Unions Turn Against Tsipras (BBG)
• Euro zone production falls more than expected in September (Reuters)
• Valeant played a key role in building, operating Philidor RX (Reuters)

The biggest event overnight came from Europe, where Draghi managed to once again jawbone the Euro lower by ober 50 pips when he told European lawmakers in a prepared testimony that downside economic risks are "clearly visible," repeating his October press conference statement, adding that the ECB will reexamine degree of accommodation in December as "inflation dynamics have somewhat weakened." And the statement that crushed the Euro: "If we were to conclude that our medium-term price stability objective is at risk, we would act by using all the instruments available within our mandate to ensure that an appropriate degree of monetary accommodation is maintained." I.e., another "whatever it takes" moment.