Asia

Any time a Fed president, governor or chairman trots out the trite cliche that the Fed is "apolitical" we can't help but laugh for one simple reason: not only is the Fed not apolitical, but is very closely ideologically tied with whichever party promotes deficit spending which by definition is inflationary: more deficits mean more debt, means more opportunity for the Fed to show off its "inflation" creating skills; and in a Keynesian world, a stable 2% inflation is the lubricant that drives and stabilizes the financial system - the Fed's true mandate.

By late January, Tim Leissner was irritated.

Irritated that Goldman wouldn’t support his move to Los Angeles to be with his famous wife Kimora Lee, irritated that the firm wouldn’t let him give an internship to the son of a shadowy, as-yet-unnamed go-between in a deal to finance a controlling stake in an Indonesian copper mine, and especially irritated that the bank seemed to be looking a lot harder at the deals he was working on in Southeast Asia in the wake of the 1MDB scandal.

Those algos who scrambled to paint yesterday's closing tape with that last second VIX slam sending the S&P back over 2,000, forgot one thing - the same thing that China also ignored - central bankers can not print trade, something we have repeated since 2011.

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

There are two very different ways to think of Antonin Scalia’s preferred method of interpreting the Constitution, often called originalism—and by the way, that Wikipedia page is unusually accurate and useful, though perhaps skewed a bit towards critics of originalism.