Business

Once hedge fund darlings, almost no one is more perfectly aligned to get obliterated by falling used car prices than America's auto rental companies, Hertz and Avis.  As Bloomberg notes today, on a combined basis, Hertz and Avis dump about 400,000 vehicles per year into the used car market and operate fleets that are multiple times larger. 

And with used car prices plunging, bondholders are starting to get slightly anxious about the collateral impact of writing down billions of dollars worth of capital assets.

Goldman Sachs' Chief US Political Economist Alec Phillips writes that tax reform faces a risk of failure, but tax cuts remain likely... in 2018 and investors need to stay realistic about the impact of fiscal stimulus.

With every other asset class roundtripping the November election outcome, it was only a matter of time before Japan's 10Y JGB - which on February 2 briefly peaked above the BOJ's "yield curve controlling" 0.10% yield ceiling, rising as high as 0.15% to the shock of a market ready to declare that Japan had finally lost control of its bond market - retraced the entire "reflationary" move from 0.0% to 0.1%.

It was almost exactly two years ago when a cash-strapped Venezuela quietly conducted its first, little-noticed gold-for-cash swap with Citigroup, as part of which Maduro converted part of his nation's gold reserves into at least $1 billion in cash courtesy of the US bank. As Reuters reported then, the motive was simple: convert $1 billion of the country's gold into much needed dollars to fund imports and keep the economy from sinking.

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The Left is morally and fiscally bankrupt, devoid of coherent solutions, and corrupted by its embrace of the Corporatocracy.

History often surprises us with unexpected ironies. For the past century, the slide to fascism could be found on the Right (conservative, populist, nationalist political parties).