SSE 50

The sarcastic highlight of the overnight session was the Chinese stock market, where just one month after injecting a record amount of new loans into the financial system, the PBOC lamented the danger posed by China's tremendous debt load: "Lending as a share of GDP, especially corporate lending as a share of GDP, is too high" People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan told China Development Forum yesterday.

It may be option expiration day (always leading to abnormal market activity) but it remains all about the weak dollar, which after crashing in the two days after the Fed's surprisingly dovish statement has put both the ECB and the BOJ in the very awkward position that shortly after both banks have drastically eased, the Euro and the Yen are now trading stronger relative to the dollar versus prior.

China's plunge protection team may be scrambling to prop up the Shanghai Composite for the duration of the People's Congress, but the moment the NPC is over, the stock "market" goes with it, and the people know it. But now that China has its favorite bubble back - housing - few care: after all the stock bubble was meant purely as a placeholder until houseflipping mania returns.

After yesterday's last hour selloff sent the S&P to the very edge of the critical support trendline which, as shown yesterday, meant 1980 had to be defended at all costs...

... so far the support has held, and in overnight trading European stocks have managed to rebound on the back of more levitation in oil, while US equity futures have ignored a drop in the USDJPY which touched 112.20 in morning trading, and have jumped by 0.5% as of this moment, up 10 points to 1,990.

After attempting a valeant, pardon the poor pun, Leap Day surge to close green for the month, a bout of late day selling resulted in the S&P500 closing just red for the month following a dramatically turbulent January, a continuation of the disappointing post Fed hike price action; indeed as noted earlier for global equities, February was the 4th consecutive month in which stocks declined and in many cases continued their presence in bear market territory.