The single biggest event overnight was the PBOC's devaluation of the Yuan to the lowest since March 2011, setting the fixing at 6.5693, the highest in over 5 years and in direct response to a stronger dollar, which however if one looks at the DXY remains well below the recent highs in the 100 range, suggesting for China this is only just beginning.
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
As readers know, I have seen some optimism in voters support for Trump and Sanders as neither are members of the corrupt Republican and Democratic political establishments. Members of both political establishments enrich themselves by betraying the American people and serving only the interest of the One Percent. The American people are being driven into the ground purely for the sake of more mega-billions for a handful of super-rich people.
Last Friday we first reported on two surprising developments: one was a record accumulation of crude tankers on anchor or steaming just off the coast of Singapore in the Straits of Malacca, awaiting higher oil prices to offload their precious cargo; the second was that as a result of previously profitable contango trades now flattening and making storage no longer profitable, oil shippers are now forced to ask for bank loans to fund offshore storage costs.
As reported yesterday, adding insult to injury to a bank that just hours earlier admitted that in addition to rigging everything else it has also been caught engaging in "stock fraud" at the same time as a new mortgage probe was launched against it, Deutsche Bank's senior debt rating was downgraded by Moody's to Baa2, just two notches above junk. For the bank with the tens of trillions in derivatives, being seen as an increasingly more distressed counterparty was not good news and explains why the CEO took the unexpected step of having to defend his firm following the downgrade.
Yesterday's weak dollar headfake has ended and overnight the USD rallied, while Asian stocks dropped to the lowest level in 7 weeks and crude oil fell as speculation returned that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates as early as next month. The pound jumped and European stocks gained thanks to a weaker EUR.