You know the world is turning to shit when a retired baseball star can (relatively eloquently) explain the sheer folly of negative interest rates.
In a torrent of tweets, the Cuban-American "Bash Brother" started to rage after BoJ's NIRP decision...
Negative interest rates in Japan is blowing my mind
— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) February 4, 2016
Then questioned their sanity...
As we noted last night, in what was the second clear example of sheer desperation by the Bank of Japan, the central banker formerly known as Peter Pan for his on the record belief that "he should fly", and as of this morning better known as Peter Panic, desperately tried to pull of his best "Draghi", up to and even stealing the ECB's trademark catch phrase, to wit:
While the biggest news of the night had nothing to do with either oil or China, all that mattered to US equity futures trading also was oil and China, and since WTI managed to rebound modestly from their biggest 2-day drop in years, continuing the trend of unprecedented, HFT-driven volatility which has far surpassed that of equities and is shown in the chart below...
Via GEFIRA,
The Bank of Japan’s unexpected rate cuts to negative are a desperate attempt to help out the FED and to support the dollar at the expense of the aging Japanese population.
The negative market reaction to the FED’s rate hike of December shows that investors do not believe an economic recovery in the US is underway. Two reasons make central banks start to raise interest rates.
Over the past year, and certainly in the aftermath of the BOJ's both perplexing and stunning announcement (as it revealed the central banks' level of sheer desperation), we have warned (most recently "Negative Rates In The U.S. Are Next: Here's Why In One Chart") that next in line for negative rates is the Fed itself, whether Janet Yellen wants it or not. Today, courtesy of Wolf Richter, we find that this is precisely what is already in the small print of the Fed's future stress test scenarios, and specifically the "severely adverse scenario" where we read that: