The writing had been on the wall - and countless online articles - for a long time...
... and on Tuesday it finally hit the world's largest asset manager, where in the war between passive-investing robots and active-investing humans, the humans lost. As the WSJ reports, at Blackrock, the era of the star "stock picker" is coming to an end, and he will be replaced by this...
With the reflation trade seemingly dead, the logical outcome is that the "disinflation" trade will soon follow. However, as that would undo most of the recent gains, central banks will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening, but can they? As RBC's Charlie McElligott writes in his morning note, "some large players in the market believe that the Fed had indeed been incorporating anticipation of ‘fiscal policy", Trump policy which may now not be coming until late 2017 or early 2018 (if at all).
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
I’ll start today with a confession: I’m an unabashed optimist.
I believe that this is one of the most exciting times in all of human history to be alive. And with good reason.
Think about it– compared to thousands of years of violent warfare that ravaged most of the world’s major cities, we live in an era of relative peace.
Pockets of conflict will always exist. But right now there’s no major world war… no persistent threat of nuclear annihilation.
European, Asian stocks have rebounded as investor anxiety over Trump economic policy and US tax reform eased following yesterday's remarkable comeback in the US market. S&P futures point to a slightly higher open, with oil higher and the dollar rebounding off fout month lows. It is a relatively quiet day in the US with the economic calendar focusing on wholesale inventories, consumer confidence and the Case-Shiller index.
In what is emerging as the latest headache for Donald Trump, a state-run Russian bank which has been under U.S. economic sanctions since 2014 disclosed on Monday that its executives had met Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and key policy adviser, during the 2016 election campaign. As reported previously, Kushner has been asked to discuss the contact, and a meeting during the same period with the Russian ambassador, with a Senate committee probing Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election.