Insurance Companies

One sign would be for non-energy junk bonds to begin dropping in price. That would mean large holders are exiting from all junk bonds, not just those companies affected by low oil prices.
Another sign would be sudden drops in share prices for banks or insurance companies that hold small amounts of energy-related bonds or bank loans, a clue that some market participants think they have derivative exposure.
A third sign to look for would be the rumors or news that the big, investment-grade energy companies are having trouble renewing their Commercial Paper, bank loans or maturing bonds (the Exxon-Mobils and Shells of the world).

One thing is certain about the ensuing “race to the bottom”. Japan’s retirement colony will end up with the hindmost. And they will surely burn professors Krugman and Summers in effigy—-even if driftwood is the only fuel they have left.

• New Normal headlines: Global stocks up on hopes of China policy easing (Reuters)
• China inflation eases to five-year low (BBC)
• U.S. Lawmakers Agree on $1.1 Trillion Spending Bill (WSJ)
• U.S. Braced for Blowback as CIA Report Lays Bare Abuses (BBG)
• CIA tortured, misled, U.S. report finds, drawing calls for action (Reuters)
• CIA Made False Claims Torture Prevented Heathrow Attacks (BBG)
• Oil Resumes Drop as Iran Sees $40 If There’s OPEC Discord (BBG)
• OPEC Says 2015 Demand for Its Crude Will Be Weakest in 12 Years (BBG)
• Greek yield curve inverted as politics raise default fears (Reuters)

Among those who’ll get to eat the losses: unsuspecting retail investors.

Astonishingly, Newton’s Third Law seems to be either forgotten or dismissed altogether, and this is a shame because the world’s financial pendulum is in the process of reaching that ever so brief pause, after which it then begins to swing in the other direction. To many thoughtful investors, it has become crystal clear that the world is indeed on the cusp of a dramatic change in direction. There will be extreme cases of financial, social, political and economic losses. But there will also be extreme cases of financial gains – the secret is understanding how and where global capital will flow.

Two months ago, to much fanfare by the progressive community, HHS, if not Dr. Jonathan Gruber, were delighted to report that as of August 15, Obamacare enrollment had hit 7.3 million sign ups, well above the 7.0 million goal. Then a week ago we learned that "projection mistakes were made" after the "Obama administration revised its estimate for Obamacare enrollment, now saying - with the bruising midterms safely in the rearview mirror - that it expects some 9.9 million people to have coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges in 2015, millions fewer than outside experts predicted." Fast forward to today when moments ago Bloomberg reported, that "the Obama administration included as many as 400,000 dental plans in a number it reported for enrollments under the Affordable Care Act, an unpublicized detail that helped surpass a goal for 7 million sign-ups."

In the first of three interviews with Merryn Somerset Webb, Hugh Hendry, manager of the Eclectica Fund, talks about what it takes to be a good hedge fund manager – and how he learned to stop worrying and love central banks. As he notes, the world is "guilty of the misconstruing of a bull market in equities, for what is actually the ongoing degradation in the soundness of the fiat monetary system."

Success in investing, in other words, comes not from over-reach, in straining to make the winning shot, but simply through the avoidance of easy errors. There is now a grave risk that an overzealous commitment to benchmarking is about to lead hundreds of billions of dollars of invested capital off a cliff. When a sufficient number of elephants start charging inelegantly towards the door, not all of them will make it through unscathed.

Meet the next piece of work...

"Solutions to the world's problems are not produced in a meeting between Bill Gates and George Soros... Renewal has to come from below... Limiting the influence [of the richest] is of the utmost importance... so that today's upper-class, high-finance capitalism can once again revert to being a capitalism of the real economy and the societal center."

The short answer, of course, is "nothing" - Congress, or the presidency, have been irrelevant ever since the Fed fully took over the US some time in late 2008. Since then, it has been the role of the central printer of the US, working on behalf of the US banking syndicate, to "get to work", and cover up the fact that Congress, its make up, or its decisions, are now inconsequential. Still, there are those whose job is to overanalyze everything, and those, whose ideological persuasion, is to believe that what there is a difference between the "left" and the "right." Still, since someone has to pay attention to the proceedings in the most farcical and polarized, if only for public consumption purposes, Congress in history may as well present what The Hill thinks will happen. Here are the five areas to watch.

When it comes to Ebola, the story that the government is telling us just keeps on changing. At first, government officials were claiming that it was very difficult to spread the Ebola virus. Some of them were even comparing it to HIV. We were given the impression that we had to have “direct contact” with someone else’s body fluids in order to have any chance of catching the virus. But of course that is not true at all. Now authorities are admitting that Ebola is “aerostable”, that it can be “spread through droplets”, and that it can remain on surfaces for up to 50 days. That is far different information than we have been getting up until this point.

• CDC says returning Ebola medical workers should not be quarantined (Reuters)
• Sweden’s central bank cuts rates to zero (FT)
• Hacking Trail Leads to Russia, Experts Say (WSJ)
• Discount-Hunting Shoppers Threaten Stores’ Holiday Cheer (BBG)
• Apple CEO fires back as retailers block Pay (Reuters)
• Repeat after us: all China data is fake - China Fake Invoice Evidence Mounts as HK Figures Diverge (BBG)
• FX Traders’ Facebook Chats Said to Be Sought in EU Probe (BBG)
• Euro Outflows at Record Pace as ECB Promotes Exodus (BBG)
• Apple boosts R&D spending in new product hunt (FT)

Yesterday, in a periodic repeat of what he says every 6 or so months, Jamie Dimon - devoid of other things to worry about - warned once again about the dangers hidden within the shadow banking system (the last time he warned about the exact same thing was in April of this year). The throat cancer patient and JPM CEO was speaking at the Institute of International Finance membership meeting in Washington, D.C., and delivered a mostly upbeat message: in fact when he said that the industry was "very close to resolving too big to fail" we couldn't help but wonder if JPM would spin off Chase or Bear Stearns first. However, when he was asked what keeps him up at night, he said non-bank lending poses a danger "because no one is paying attention to it." He said the system is "huge" and "growing." Dimon is right that the problem is huge and growing: according to the IMF which just two days earlier released an exhaustive report on the topic, shadow banking (which does not include the $600 trillion in notional mostly interest rate swap derivatives) amounts to over $70 trillion globally.

Virtually every country in the world spends more money than they collect in taxes, but no group of countries has done a better job at this than those that formed the Euro-zone. This collective group has so much debt, that a recent study by the BIS concluded it would take 20 consecutive years of surpluses to simply bring debt loads back to levels previously reached prior to the current crisis. Considering that this has never happened before, we have little confidence that this type of spending constraint can be accepted and implemented by any of the respective governments. Every market has a release valve, and for Europe it will be the bond market. The beginning of the end, so to speak, really starts when social unrest reaches a new level. It’s at that point confidence rapidly declines and so too will the European bond market.