Asia

Cities reduced to rubble, schools and hospitals leveled, prisoners tortured and executed, car bombs exploding. Long lines of refugees, their homes in ruins, stumbling along a road to nowhere with their few remaining possessions carried on their backs. Graphic photos and videos from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa continue to show the downside of the “New World Order,” the global system operating under American direction envisioned by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.

We rang the alarm bell when on Sunday night, one of our "favorite" companies and Asia's largest, junk-rated commodity trader, Noble Group, unexpectedly announced two jarring developments: the removal of its long-term, ex-Goldman CEO, Yusuf Alireza, as well as the sale of its top performing asset, Noble Americas Energy Solutions.

The story of the unprecedented build up of various commodity tankers off the coast of Singapore, as well as everywhere else, has been duly covered here as well as the reasons behind it.

Notably, two weeks ago we cautioned that with the contango no longer leading to profitable offshore storage of oil, many shipping companies would have to start offloading their cargo, or as we recently reported, have started incurring debt to fund said storage costs in hopes of avoiding shifting storage to land:

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.

 

There are just two drivers setting the pace for today's risk mood: the OPEC meeting in Vienna which started a few hours ago, and the ECB's announcement as well as Mario Draghi's press statement due out just one hour from now. Both are expected to not reveal any major surprises, with OPEC almost certainly unable to implement a production freeze while the ECB is expected to remain on hold and provide some more details on its corporate bond buying program, although there is some modest risk of upside surprise in either case.