Deutsche Bank

Saudi Arabia is staring down a current account-fiscal account outcome that makes Brazil look favorable by comparison. With the fiscal budget deficit projected at some 20% of GDP and two proxy wars combined with the necessity of maintaining the status quo for ordinary Saudis serving to make fiscal retrenchment next to impossible, you might be wondering how high oil prices need to climb in order for the Saudis to plug the gap. Deutsche Bank has the answer.

Where the great oil crash hits close to home for most Americans, is when firms such as Houston based ConocoPhillips announce that the E&P giant is about to terminate 10%, or 1,800 people, of its global workforce, in the next several weeks as it copes with low oil prices. "Our industry is undergoing a dramatic downturn, which has caused us to look at our future workforce needs. As we have assessed the implications of lower prices on our business, we’ve made the difficult decision that workforce reductions will be necessary.”

Just two days before the September 3 ECB governing council meeting and press conference, ABN Amro released the genie from the bottle, when its head macro strategist Nick Kounis said the he now sees "a much bigger risk that the ECB will step up QE as soon as this week’s meeting. We see this probability at around 40%, so it is an increasingly close call.

China has just cornered the Fed: not just diplomatically, as observed when China's PBOC clearly demanded that Yellen's Fed not start a rate hiking cycle, but also mechanistically, as can be seen by the acute and sudden selloff across all asset classes in the past 3 weeks. Now Yellen has about 365 days or so to find a solution, one which works not only for the US, but also does not leave China a smoldering rubble of three concurrently burst bubbles. Good luck.

It's a busy week for the market, and not to mention the Dow Jones-dependent Fed, which will have to parse through reports on Chicago PMI, Construction Spending, ISM (Mfg and Services), ADP, Productivity and Labor Costs, Factory Orders, Trade Balance, and the weekly highlight: Friday's Jobs reports.

"The PBoC’s actions are equivalent to an unwind of QE, or in other words Quantitative Tightening. The potential for more China outflows is huge [and] the bottom line is that QT has much more to go. It is hard to become very optimistic on global risk appetite until a solution is found to China’s evolving QT."

Late last year, Saudi Arabia "Plaxico'd" itself and the petrodollar when, in an effort to "preserve market share" and bankrupt US shale producers, the kingdom endeavored to purposefully suppress crude prices. Nine months and billions in liquidated FX reserves later, Saudi Arabia is facing a budget crisis of epic proportions. 

Although we've talked plenty about the impact of the yuan deval on Asia-Pac and LatAm, we haven’t yet mentioned India where yesterday, in the midst of the turmoil, central bank governor Raghuram Rajan sought to calm nervous markets by reassuring the world that India is not, for now anyway, in any danger thanks to ample FX reserves and a low CA.Be that as it may, economic realities are economic realities and a currency war is a currency war, which is why, we suppose, the Indian government’s chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian thinks the country might just have to hit back.

Blink and you missed it. With stocks surging back to green and CNBC celebrating, one could be forgiven (were on a goldfish) for believing everything is truly awesome again. However, as Deutsche Bank details, there are ten good reasons why this is far from over...

The fragility of this artificially manipulated financial system was exposed over the last couple of days of last week. It all ended with the S&P 500 falling -3.19% on Friday - its worst day since November 9th 2011.

• Deutsche Bank Says Rout ‘Very Serious’ as Growth Outlook Dims (BBG)
• Great fall of China sinks world stocks, dollar tumbles (Reuters)
• Global Stocks Fall Sharply Amid Concerns About the Chinese Economy (WSJ)
• Stock Rout Spreads Through Europe After China Plunge (BBG)
• China stocks give up year's gains as 'national team' stays on bench (Reuters)
• The Fed Is Looking at a Very Different Dollar Than Wall Street (BBG)
• French train gunman 'dumbfounded' by terrorist tag (Reuters)

Over the weeks, months, and years ahead we’ll begin to understand more about the fallout from the death of the petrodollar and nowhere is it likely to be more apparent than in Saudi Arabia where widening fiscal and current account deficits have forced the Saudis to tap the bond market to mitigate the FX drawdown that's fueling speculation about the viability of the dollar peg. As Bloomberg reports, the current situation mirrors a "very scary moment" in Saudi Arabia’s history.

Last week, in the global currency war’s latest escalation, Kazakhstan instituted a free float for the tenge causing the currency to immediately plunge by some 25%. The rationale behind the move was clear enough. What might not be as clear is how recent events in developing economy FX markets stem from a seismic shift we began discussing late last year - namely, the death of the petrodollar system which has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance and was, until recently, a fixture of the post-war global economic order.

Shockwaves from China’s devaluation have conspired with sluggish global demand and an attendant commodities slump to wreak havoc on developing market currencies the world over. On the heels of Kazakhstan's dramatic move to float the tenge, here's which currencies are next in line to tumble.