“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
The FOMC will release its meeting minutes from the December 2017 meeting at 2pm ET today. The central bank hiked by 25bps in December, and now sees seven hikes over the forecast horizon vs six previously.
"We expect the main central banks to move further away from super-accommodative monetary policies in 2018. Illiquid assets trading at expensive valuations may suffer the most in this context. We prefer sovereign bonds to equity, especially in the US."
China's PBOC called for rectifying irregularities in electricity use of some bitcoin mining fields, and during a closed-door meeting, discussed limiting the power use of bitcoin mining.
According to Nomura, Bitcoin's price surge in Q4 could result in the "wealth effect" materializing in 2018 Q1, in which case a potential boost to real GDP of up to about 0.3% can be expected.
Watch out for crowded stocks at the beginning of the year: according to BofA, the 10 most overweight stocks have lagged the 10 most underweight stocks on average by 57bp and 117bp during the first 15 and 30 calendar days of the year.
2017 was not a good year for Byron Wien's traditional list of economic, financial political "surprise" forecasts, so let's see if 2018 will be any better.
While Bitcoin remains lower in 2018, down around 2%, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple are surging with ETH breaking to a new record high over $880 following headlines that Russia is exploring ways to create a 'cryptorouble'.
U.S. equity futures are higher in the first trading session of 2018 offsetting Friday's last hour sharp drop, as Asian stocks roar to new all time highs, while a surging euro which has rallied near to a 3 year high pressured European stocks across the board.
"To give you an idea of how stupid these rules are. Russians would be allowed to own cryptocurrencies but they wouldn’t be allowed to use them for anything. "
The ninth anniversary of Zero Hedge is just around the corner, and so, for the ninth year in a row we continue our tradition of summarizing what our readers found to be the most relevant, exciting, and actionable news of the year. We bring you the articles that you, dear reader, found to be the most interesting in the past 365 days.
