Asia

Following yesterday's dollar spike which topped the longest rally in the greenback in one month, the prevailing trade overnight has been more of the same, and in the last session of this holiday shortened week we have seen the USD rise for the fifth consecutive day on concerns the suddenly hawkish Fed (at least as long as the S&P is above 2000) may hike sooner than expected, which in turn has pressured WTI below $39 earlier in the session, and leading to weakness across virtually all global risk assets.

One month ago, just as Cushing storage was rapidly approaching its operational capacity, we warned that Cushing (and increasingly all parts of PADD 2) is denying storage requests. We also said that overall PADD 2 inventories had risen to a new record high 155 million barrels...

... hinting that it was just a matter of time before excess production would be shifted to other regions, most notably the Gulf Coast, or PADD 3.

Following two days of rangebound moves, where Monday's modest market rebound was undone by the Tuesday just as modest decline (despite the early surge higher on the latest "bullish for stocks" European terrorism), overnight equity action continued to be more of the same, and as of this moment S&P 500 futures were unchanged, while European stocks were modestly higher.

November's mass murders in Paris; today's suicide bombings in Brussles... that's just the beginning for Europe according to Dutch Party For Freedom (PVV) leader and prominent counter-Islamist campaigner Geert Wilders who spoke earlier today with Breitbart London in the aftermath of this morning’s major terror attack and has lamented it is just the beginning of growing Islamist violence.

Trump spoke with The Washington Post editors about his foreign policy views, which they described as “unabashedly non-interventionist” in one place but also described this way:

Speaking ahead of a major address on foreign policy later Monday in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Trump said he advocates an aggressive U.S. posture in the world with a light footprint [bold mine-DL].