Don’t look now, but Barclays just joined the chorus of European banks reporting horrific results.
Shares plunged by double-digits on Tuesday after the bank said it swung to a £1.9 billion pre-tax loss in Q4 and moved to cut the dividend and shed its African subsidiary.
With markets happy to put February in the history books because it marked the fourth consecutive monthly decline in global stocks, we move on to March 1st, which doubles down as 'Super Tuesday' in the US when Trump's presidential candidacy will almost certainly be sealed and a day in which stocks decided to join the super fun by super surging overnight on nothing but bad global macro and economic which however was promptly ignored and instead the focus was on ongoing central bank intervention and even more jawboning.
Via EvergreenGavekal.com,
“Betting against gold is the same as betting on governments. He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history.”
– Charles De Gaulle, Leader of the French resistance during WWII and 18th President of France
SUMMARY
Authored by Mark St.Cyr,
One of the premier features that was to help markets interpret upcoming policy moves made at the Federal Reserve was the idea and implementation of: forward guidance. This new feature was enacted by the former Chairman Ben Bernanke. The reasoning? In a nut shell it was no more than a heads up to the financial markets of what the Fed. would do, and when. i.e., Hit this metric of X and the Fed. will do Y. So – position accordingly.
Fearful of a renewed rise in the US dollar, Saxo's chief economist Steen Jakobsen expects a "nasty March" as this will kill commodity stabilization as well as the ability of emerging markets to live up to their expectations to revitalize the global economy. Despite The Bank of Japan's clear "example of how not to do things," Jakobsen warns other central banks will follow Kuroda's cue and, as he explains below, is "shorting everything" as he sees two major canaries in the coalmine.