Business

As one would expect, in a week that saw the biggest one-day drop in US equities since last September, retail investors bailed on US stocks resulting in what BofA dubbed "risk-off flows" as $1.6 billion was pulled from global equities - with active managers once again getting the short end of the stick, with $4.3 billion in outflows from mutual funds, largest in 7 weeks while another $2.7 billion flowed  into ETFs - offset by $9.7 billion inflows to bonds and $0.2 billion to gold.

Despite Bitcoin dropping below 50% of total cryptocurrency market cap for the first time, the dominant virtual currency has continued to soar this week, breaking above $1950 this morning (as the dollar drifts lower).

Bitcoin is now up 110% against the dollar in 2017...

Gold and Silver Bullion Coins See Sales “Explosion” In UK On “Wave Of Political Turmoil”

by Jan Harvey of Reuters

In a warehouse a dozen miles to the northwest of Cardiff, the Royal Mint is running its machines through the night to keep up with demand for one of the big beneficiaries of the last year's political turmoil - gold and silver bullion.

Gold Sovereigns

While we can track policy uncertainty (and its decoupling from global market risk perceptions)...

And we can follow the relative level of "crisis" and the market's complacency of it (risk perceptions collapsing as "crisis" explodes)...

Geopolitical tensions, which take many different forms, are however difficult to measure. One proxy for assessing the geopolitical environment is the news-based Geopolitical Risk Index developed by economists from the Federal Reserve Board.

And close-up...

Fabricating data in China, it turns out, is not only a favorite government pastime. Publicly traded, if state-owned, phone giant Unicom Group fabricated financials relating to 1.8 billion yuan ($261 billion) in revenue over a five-year period from 2012 to 2016 - or as the company admitted, it engaged in an "unprecedented degree of falsified revenue."  This is China we are talking about, where the definition of "unprecedented" is very different from the US.