San Francisco Fed

The global risk on mood (which is really anything but, and is merely an unprecedented short covering squeeze as we will report momentarily) launched by an abysmal jobs report one week ago and "validated" yesterday by the surprisingly dovish FOMC minutes, which said nothing new but merely confirmed what most knew, namely that a rate hike is almost certain to not occur until mid-2016 if ever, and accelerated by a Fed-driven collapse in the dollar which overnight has led to a historic 3.4% move in the Indonesian Rupiah the most since 2008, has pushed global stocks even higher in their biggest weekly rally since 2012, despite the start of an earnings season where virtually every single company reporting so far has stumbled on earnings reports that were far worse than even gloomy consensus had expected.

The shark jumping continues as Citi says its analysts "have found serious residual seasonality in payroll reports for the period from August through October"...

It was a tale of two markets overnight: Asia first - where all commodity hell broke loose - and then Europe (and the US), where central banks did everything they could to stabilize the already terrible sentiment.

After sliding early in Sunday pre-market trade, overnight US equity futures managed to rebound on the now traditional low-volume levitation from a low of 1938 to just over 1950 at last check, ignoring the biggest single-name blowup story this morning which is the 23% collapse in Volkswagen shares, and instead have piggybacked on what we said was the last Hail Mary for the market: the hope of more QE from either the ECB or the BOJ. Tonight, it was the latter and while Japan's market are closed until Thursday for public holidays, its currency which is the world's preferred carry trade and the primary driver alongside VIX manipulation of the S&P500, has jumped from a low of just over 119 on Friday morning to a high of 120.4, pushing the entire US stock market with it.

Kyle Bass shared his macro views during the “Squawk on the Street”

With just 20 minutes to go until the latest most important jobs report ever in the history of man, Richmond Fed Chief Lacker just explained why "the case for raising rates is still strong"...

LACKER: BOTH MANDATE CONDITIONS 'APPEAR TO HAVE BEEN MET', EXCEPTIONALLY LOW RATES NO LONGER WARRANTED BY JOB MKT
LACKER: AUG. JOBS REPORT UNLIKELY TO `MATERIALLY ALTER' PICTURE

But perhaps most crucially, Lacker explains "recent financial market volatility is unlikely to affect economic fundamentals in the United States and thus has limited implications for monetary policy," removing the one last leg for permabulls to rely on (that is if you velieve The Fed is not Dow-Data-Dependent).

It is unclear what precipitated it (some blamed China concerns, fears of rate hikes, commodity weakness, technical picture deterioration although  it's all just goalseeking guesswork) but overnight S&P futures followed yesterday's unexpected slide following what were explicitly dovish Fed minutes, and took another sharp leg lower down by almost 20 points, set to open below the 200 DMA again, as the dazed and confused investing world reacts to what both the Treasury and Oil market signal is a deflationary deluge. Indeed, oil is about to trade under $40 while the 10Y Treasury was last seen trading at 2.07%. Incidentally, the last time oil was here in March of 2009, the Fed was about to unleash QE 1. This time, so called experts are debating if the Fed will hike rates in one month or three.

"Evidence in support of Bernanke's view of the channels through which QE works is at best mixed. There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed inflation and real economic activity. Indeed, casual evidence suggests that QE has been ineffective in increasing inflation."

We are delighted to report that about 7 years after it was glaringly obvious to everyone except the Fed of course, now - with the usual half decade delay - even the NY Fed has finally figured out what even 5 year olds get. "A new study from the New York Federal Reserve faults these policies for enabling college institutions to aggressively raise tuitions. The implication is the federal government is fueling a vicious cycle of higher prices and government aid that ultimately could cost taxpayers and price some Americans out of higher education, similar to what some economists contend happened with the housing bubble."

The Fed would have needed to hike rates by 800 bps in the wake of the dot-com collapse in order to prevent the housing bubble. That would have purged the system and gradually, the FOMC could have eased by around 300 bps over the next four years. That policy course would have prevented the speculative bubble that brought capital markets the world over to their knees in 2008. And why didn’t the Fed do this? Because "such a large increase in interest rates would have depressed output more than the Great Recession did." In other words, thanks to Alan Greenspan, the US economy cannot function under a normalized monetary policy regime.

And so the 2015 season of the Greek drama is coming to a close following last night's vote in Greek parliament to vote the country into even more austerity than was the case before Syriza was voted into power with promises of removing all austerity, even with Europe - which formally admits Greece is unsustainable in its current debt configuration - now terminally split on how to proceed, with Germany's finmin still calling for a "temporary Grexit", the IMF demanding massive debt haircuts, while the rest of Europe (and not so happy if one is Finnish or Dutch) just happy to kick the can for the third time.

The Shanghai Composite Index had dropped as much as 3.8% to a 4 month low before the news that the cops were going to arrest anyone who was caught "maliciously shorting stocks", when everything suddenly took off, and the SHCOMP closed  a "Dramamine required" 5.8% higher, the biggest daily increase since March 2009! Stocks around the globe followed, with US equity futures wiping out much of yesterday's losses and up 1% at last check.

After seven long years of aggressively defending a monetary policy regime that's served to exacerbate the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the Fed looks at whether "the legend of Robin Hood" offers any helpful pointers about how to reignite America's economic growth engine. Spoiler alert: the Fed doesn't think "taking from the rich to give to the poor" would be very productive.

"While most are focused on the risks around a withdrawal of liquidity, we believe the biggest hit to confidence could be the opposite: if another round of US QE is necessary to prop up the economy," BofAML says, suggesting the Fed is now cornered as raising rates risks destabilizing markets and QE4 risks betraying the futility of successive central bank interventions.