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Free trade, as a matter of practicality, can only exist where all trade partners exist on a perfectly “level playing field”

"This positioning squeeze should have now run its course. Both positioning analysis based on our proprietary flows and the CFTC data suggest that the market is now short USD and long risk for the yea. A further increase in risk appetite will depend on central bank action, starting with the ECB this week."

For those wondering if Hillary Clinton's feud with the pharmaceutical industry in general, and with Turing Pharma's Martin Shkreli in particular, is over we just got the answer: it is only just getting started. Moments ago Reuters reported that Clinton has sent a letter to the FTC for recommendations on "changing laws to prevent anticompetitive practices", with a focus on Turing which has become a poster child for all that is wrong with the US specialty pharma industry, and the pharmaceutical industry in general.

While the macro watchers were keenly awaiting China's macroeconomic data dump on Sunday night, which was far worse than reported (as we will show shortly), a just as notable development was taking place in China's microeconomic world, where as the FT reported on Sunday, China's state-owned SinoSteel, the country's second largest importer of iron-ore, and a major miner and steel trader (yes, another commodity trader) was "poised to default on its bonds this week, the latest test of whether Beijing is willing to impose market discipline on national champion companies."

The dollar dropped about half a milligram gold, and 50mg silver.

But who wants to read about the universal currency falling, failing? Few people are so barbarous as to think of the dollar’s value as being priced in terms a monetary metal.

Oil companies have sold $61.5 billion in stocks and bonds since January as oil prices have tumbled. However, the fees geneated are a tiny fraction of the bank's real exposure to the energy sector, at over $150 billion. So have the banks learned their lesson?  "The bankers have gone through this before,” says Oscar Gruss’s Meyer. “They know how it works out in the end, and it’s not pretty." Then again, perhaps banks are just sailing on an ocean of liquidity allowing them to postpone the day of Mark to Market reckoning, especially since this time, everyone is in it together....

Germany's police union chief, Rainer Wendt, called for a fence to be built along the country's border to stem the flow of migrants. : Wendt said Germany was facing "social unrest" due to the large number of migrants entering the country. "Our internal (law and) order is at risk...Someone needs to pull the emergency brake now," he cautioned.

Q: Why do you still expect the FOMC to hike rates in December?

A: Because the FOMC leadership has said that a rate hike by the end of the year is likely if the economy and markets evolve broadly as expected. Our near-term forecast is similar to theirs, so our baseline is also that they hike.

"... you can bet that whenever an earthquake like this happens, especially when it’s triggered by two invisible tectonic plates like put gamma and call gamma and then cascades through arcane geologies like options expiration dates and ETF pricing software, both the media and self-interested parties will begin a mad rush to find someone or something a tad bit more obvious to blame. So you end up getting every investment process that uses a computer – from high frequency trading to risk parity allocations to derivative hedges – all lumped together in one big shotgun blast"

While to many Quantitative Tightening is a novel concept, the reality is that China (+ Euroclear) have been dumping Treasurys and liquidating reserves since January when total holdings peaked at $1.6 trillion last summer, and have since declined to $1.38 trillion. It means that China has sold a quarter trillion dollars worth of Treasurys in the past year, in the process offsetting what would have been about 25% of the Fed's QE3.

It was clear what was about to happen in Syria only because we understood one important fundamental – that there are no “sides” in any modern conflict, only proxies fighting on a global chessboard controlled by the same elitist interests. Syria represented a perfect catalyst for a planetary scale conflict triggered between East and West in a way that could divert attention from internationalists. Modern war, whether through kinetics or economics, is almost always theater designed to distract and terrorize the masses, which are the true target of any conflagration.

There are two parties to robbery – the taker and the takee. We have seen what happened to the victims. They are too busy picking through trash bins to go to the Walmart website. But what about the takers? They are busy too – lobbying… eating foie gras and caviar… and offering to save the world with increasingly radical monetary policies. It is time to undo the Fed’s control of the financial system. Let takees get the interest they are entitled to. And let the takers get what they’ve got coming to them.

The ability of the Nasdaq 100 to overcome nearby resistance would be one of the first price-based signs that the current stock rally may be more than just a mean-reversion bounce.

There is no time to lose. Russia is on the march, in unison with the emboldened and enriched Iranians, thanks again to our president. Putin and the ayatollahs know they will enjoy only another 464 days with this president and that none of his likely replacements will be so complacent and flexible, to use his own term. We should therefore expect that they will want to make as much hay as they can while the sun reflects off of Obama’s insouciant grin.

One of the main reasons why the BLS has been massively overstimating job creation ever since great financial crisis, is due to the well-known birth-death adjustment, aka the CES Net Birth/Death Model, which quantitatively is shown on the chart below, has resulted in the "addition" of some 5.3 million jobs, that don't actually exist, but are merely modelled by the BLS which continues to assume the same new business creation/destruction dynamics that existed before the crisis. The is a big problem with this fundamental assumption: it is dead wrong. Here's why...