Presenting this morning's best overnight wrap, which comes courtesy of Rabobank's Michael Every, and whose title, "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?", was inspired by obvious events.
Market comments
“I see a little silhouetto of a man; Scaramucci, Scaramucci, will you do the Fandango?”
Welcome to August: you may be surprised to learn that S&P 500 futures are once again levitating, higher by 0.3%, and tracking European and Asian markets. Asian equities traded higher across the board after China's Caixin Manufacturing PMI beat expectations and printed its highest since March, refuting the decline in the official PMI data reported a day earlier, while firmer commodity prices boost both sentiment and commodity stocks across Asia and Europe.
As many traders quietly leave for summer break soaking up even more liquidity as they go, a busy US calendar unfolds in the week ahead, with ISM, PCE price data and, of course, payrolls in the spotlight.
Key Events, courtesy of RanSquawk
With high-margin FICC revenues stuck in a secular decline across the financial industry, banks are forced to extract as much profit as possible from existing product lines. Which explains why JPMorgan will soon be using a "first-of-its-kind robot" to do away with carbon-based traders altogether and execute trades across its global equities algorithms business using a "robot", after a recent trial of JPM's new artificial intelligence (AI) program showed it was "much more efficient than traditional methods of buying and selling", the FT reports.
Submitted by Koos Jansen, BullionStar.com.
My best estimate as of June 2017 with respect to total above ground gold reserves within the Chinese domestic market is 20,193 tonnes. The majority of these reserves are held by the citizenry, an estimated 16,193 tonnes; the residual 4,000 tonnes, which is a speculative yet conservative estimate, is held by the Chinese central bank the People’s Bank of China.