New Zealand

It could soon trigger the burst of the world's largest bubble

• "Soaring consumer confidence" - How the Economy Is Stoking Voter Anger at Incumbent Governors (WSJ)
• Euro zone deflation worries shield German Bunds from upbeat Fed (Reuters)
• Greece’s Euro Dilemma Is Back as Minister Sees Volatility (BBG)
• Ukraine gas supplies in doubt as Russia seeks EU payment deal (Reuters)
• Sterling Lads Chats Show FX Traders Matching Fix Orders (BBG)
• NATO Tracks Large-Scale Russia Air Activity in Europe (WSJ)
• U.K. SFO Charges Ex-Tullett Prebon Broker in Libor-Rigging Probe (BBG)
• Jerusalem on edge after shooting of rabbi (FT)
• Israeli police kill Palestinian suspected of shooting far-right activist (Reuters)
• Samsung seeks smartphone revamp to arrest profit slide (Reuters)

The week ahead, as if it mattered.

"What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly."

If there is a cabal running things, they are not doing a good job.  Maybe they are not really running things.  Here is what next week looks like if we did not know it was all pre-determined.  

Not everything is as it seems. While the PBOC may be taking a stand on monetarism and its character, it has been very curious that the yuan has not fully participated in the dollar turmoil marking so many other “dollar” dependent nations. While the yuan’s appreciation trend may have been altered, that has not led again to the kind of disorder that marked the currency earlier in the year. Maybe that is due, at least in part, to these expectations that the PBOC will eventually relent on its new approach, but we also think that the PBOC is at least looking the other way on some of the “old tricks” that supported the Chinese version of the dollar short.

Regulators from the U.S. and the UK are in a “war room” today conducting financial war games to see if they can cope with fall-out when the next big bank collapses. "We are going to make sure that we can handle an institution that previously would have been regarded as too big to fail. We're confident that we now have choices that did not exist in the past," Osborne said at the International Monetary Fund's annual meeting.

Today US activity will be very light given the Columbus Day holiday. As DB summarizes, we have a relatively quiet day for data watchers today but the calendar will pick up tomorrow and beyond with a big focus on inflation numbers amongst other things. Indeed tomorrow will see the release of Germany’s ZEW survey alongside CPI prints from the UK, France and Spain. Wednesday’s data highlights will include the US retail sales for September, the Fed’s Beige Book, CPI readings from China and Germany, US PPI, and the NY Fed Empire State survey. Draghi will speak twice on Wednesday which could also be a source for headlines. On Thursday, we will get Industrial Production stats and the Philly Fed Survey from the US on top of the usual weekly jobless claims. European CPI will also be released on Wednesday. We have the first reading of October’s UofM Consumer Sentiment on Friday along with US building permits/housing starts. Yellen’s speech at the Boston Fed Conference on Friday (entitled “Inequality of Economic Opportunity”) will also be closely followed.

Because humor like this obviously costs money. As always, from the one and only Dennis Gartman: "Down 35 points one day; up 35 points the next! The Bulls were taken out and shot Tuesday; the Bears were shot yesterday and all we know for certain is that the upward sloping trend still holds and that weakness is to be bought with the Fed still behind the market."

Bitcoin is so last year.  The price of it in dollars made a new low for the year today.  Is the dollar's future as bleak as it looked?

Low interest rates are a direct cause of credit bubbles, and this is what is happening in Singapore

"If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect 'freedom', then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means." There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism.

De-dollarization has been an ongoing theme hidden just below the surface of the mainstream media for more than a year as Russia and China slowly but surely attempt to "isolate" the US Dollar. Until very recently, direct trade agreements with China (in other words, bypassing the US Dollar exchange in bilateral trade) had been with smaller trade partners. On the heels of Western pressure, Russia and China were forced closer together and de-dollarization accelerated from Turkey to Argentina as an increasing number of countries around the world realize the importance of this chart. However, things are about to get even more dramatic. As Bloomberg reports, China will start direct trading between the yuan and the euro tomorrow as the world’s second-largest economy seeks to spur global use of its currency in a "fresh step forward in China’s yuan internationalization." With civil unrest growing on every continent and wars (proxy or other) at tipping points, perhaps, just perhaps, the US really does want rid of the weight of the USD as a reserve currency after all (as championed here by Obama's former right hand economist)... now that would be an intriguing 'strategy'.

For the longest time anyone suggesting that Europe's economic collapse was nothing short of a deflationary collapse (which would only be remedied with the kind of a money paradopping response that Japan is currently experiment with and where, for example, prices of TVs are rising at a 10% clip courtesy of the BOJ before prices rise even more) aka a "Japan 2.0" event, was widely mocked by the very serious economist establishment, and every uptick in the EuroSTOXX was heralded by the drama majors posing as financial analysts as the incontrovertible sign the European recovery has finally arrived. Well, they were wrong, and Europe is now facing if not already deep in a triple-dip recession. Which also explains why now it is up to the ECB to do all those failed things that the BOJ did before the Fed convinced it it needs to do even more of those things that failed the first time around, just so the super rich can get even richer in the shortest time possible. So we were a little surprised when none other than Goldman Sachs today diverged with the ranks of the very serious economists and the drama major pundits, and declared that "recent trends in some European economies already qualify as a Japanese-style stagnation."

Oops.