Bad news is once again good news... for stocks that is.
After a month and a half of markets unable to decide if they should buy or sell on ugly data, over the weekend, People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan expressed faith in the economy, and said there is no basis for further Yuan devaluation, something the PBOC has said consistently over the past year, despite two sharp devaluation episodes.
Excerpted from Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin,
Credit is not innately good or bad. Simplistically, productive Credit is constructive, while non-productive Credit is inevitably problematic. This crucial distinction tends to be masked throughout the boom period. Worse yet, a prolonged boom in “productive” Credit – surely fueled by some type of underlying monetary disorder - can prove particularly hazardous (to finance and the real economy).
Submitted by Leonard Brecken via OilPrice.com,
During the 1990s, developing nations including Mexico and many in Asia became very competitive manufacturing bases due to lower wage structures. This, I believe, was the root cause of the use of failed fiscal and monetary policy to “close the gap” with the competitiveness of low-cost wage structures around the world, which has played out for three decades. The result has been three bubbles and a worsening systemic problem of wage and taxation disparity between the U.S. and developing nations.
In our column last week we were warning you about Deutsche Bank’s problems and potential issues with its derivatives portfolio and its capital structure. The story continued to unfold in the past week and Deutsche Bank was pushed into a corner as more and more investors started to lose confidence in the bank. A plan to buy back $5.4B in debt in a desperate move to reassure the capital markets. In fact, Deutsche’s move is so desperate it will even start buying back debt that was issued less than six weeks ago.
The text that follows may be the best summary of what has happened on Wall Street - both forensically and philosophical - over the past 7 years, explaining how central banks broke the "market", and why traders, investors, regulators, policy makers, and everyone else suddenly has no idea either what is going on or what to do next. Not surprisingly, it comes from Deutsche Bank, which this week has been staring at the corpe of Lehman Brothers and wondering if it is next...
From DB's Aleksandar Kocic
Asphyxiation -- code orange?