It was just one year ago when the biggest worry for the market - which culminated with a near 10% S&P correction in in early 2016 - was the daily plunge in the Yuan driven by the surging dollar, which in turn prompted China to engage in an unprecedented reserve liquidation (in which it sold both government bonds and equities), leading to a daily selloff in risky assets on days when the Yuan was fixed lower.
In early February, in a post titled "A Wounded Deutsche Bank Lashes Out At Central Bankers: Stop Easing, You Are Crushing Us", we showed just how vast the feud between Europe's biggest - and ever more troubled commercial bank - and the ECB had become. As DB's Parag Thatte lamented then, "ECB rhetoric suggests additional easing measures forthcoming in March.
Following Mario Draghi's seemingly constant mention of The ECB's credibility during yesterday's press conference, none other than ECB member (and Austrian national bank chief) Ewald Nowotny exclaimed rather oddly that "The ECB is the most independent central bank in the world." This was apparently more than former Greek FinMin Yanis Varoufakis could handle as he unleashed a scathing op-ed to explain why, in fact, The ECB is the least independent central bank exclaiming that "the pretense of independence serves as a fig leaf for interventions th
One of the reasons why the USDJPY tumbled overnight is because of a set of comments by one of the most hawkish BOJ board members, Takehiro Sato, expressed pessimism about the economy and the central bank’s strategy, saying in a speech Thursday that the BOJ won’t be able to reach its 2% inflation target as forecast and negative rates won’t work to boost investment.
In the aftermath of the bizarre SWIFT hack that supposedly allowed brazen Asian hackers to steal $81 million from the account of the Bangladesh central bank held at the Fed, attention has predictably shifted to the question of whether there was just "one cockroach." As it turns out there were at least 50. As Reuters reports, citing Fed records, "the U.S. Federal Reserve detected more than 50 cyber breaches between 2011 and 2015, with several incidents described internally as "espionage."