Asia

With Q4 earnings season drawing to a close, here is a quick recap of the key issues facing corporate CEOs and CFOs based on their conference calls as summarized by Goldman's David Kostin: 1) Company managements forecast positive US GDP growth in 2016, in contrast with investor concerns of a potential recession. However, global growth prospects appear grim, particularly within commodity-exposed nations. (2) Strong domestic consumer demand persists amid industrial weakness. (3) Several firms announced large or accelerated share repurchase programs in 2016.

Submitted by Dalan McEndree via OilPrice.com,

There was some hope in early Japanese trading that after a seemingly endless rout in the USDJPY, which has seen the Yen surge the most in the past two weeks since the 1998 Asian crisis, the BOJ would intervene, if not via policy where it has botched things up beyond repair then directly by selling Yen on the tape: the reason for this is not only yesterday's direct intervention that sent the USDJPY soaring by over 150 pips briefly, but also after a report that Finance Ministry’s FX chief Masatsugu Asakawa met deputy chief cabinet secretary to discuss market issues; this was followed by a mee

Neither USDJPY nor Japanese stocks can hold a bid in the early going in Asia markets which has dragged both into the red post-QQE2. Since Kuroda took over from The Fed by doubling down on his cunning plan in October 2014, Japanese stocks are down 11.4%, USDJPY is unchanged, and only Japanese bonds have made any gains (up 3.7%).

So what we want to know is - how will Abe et al. explain to the Japanese people how they lost so much of their retirement funds by forcing GPIF to allocate so much to stocks?

Yesterday morning, when musing on the day's key event namely Yellen's congressional testimony, we dismissed the most recent bout of European bank euphoria which we said "will be brief if not validated by concrete actions, because while central banks have the luxury of jawboning, commercial banks are actually burning through funds - rapidly at that - and don't have the luxury of hoping for the best while doing nothing." This morning DB has wiped out all of yesterday's gain.