Via GEFIRA,
The world’s third largest economy has an aging and shrinking population and will simply disappear. The low fertility is not unique to Japan. The same problem besets Taiwan, China and Korea as well as the United States and Europe. In the West the establishment has opted for population replacement.
One lesson from the 2007-08 crisis was that the vast majority of financial market participants, never mind the general public, were unfamiliar with subprime mortgages until the crisis was underway. Even now, we doubt many have much understanding of repo, the divergence between LIBOR and Fed Funds from 9 August 2007 and Eurodollar liquidity.
Just two weeks ago, Bank of America's Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett came out with what was more or less the most apocalyptic big bank forecast for the coming year. In it, he predicted that the market would not only peak in the first half of 2018, and that there would be a flash crash "a la 1987/1994/1998" in just a few months.
One look at S&P futures this morning reveals an unchanged market, however it is again the violent sector rotation that is taking place behind the scenes that is the real story, with defensive sectors real estate, retail, food, utilities outperforming while investors continue to bail and book profits on tech stocks after sharp gains since the start of the year.
The first full week of December is shaping up as rather busy, with such Tier 1 data in the US as the payrolls report, durable goods orders and trade balance. We also get UK PMI data and GDP, retail sales across the Euro Area, as well as central bank meetings including Australia RBA and BoC monetary policy meeting.
Key events per RanSquawk