By Andrew Brown, a partner for macro and strategy at ShoreVest Capital Partners
From a global macroeconomic perspective, we encourage readers to consider that the world is experiencing an extended, rolling process of deflating its credit excesses. It is now simply China’s turn.
“Thousands of new doors opened and rents soared. This created a bubble, and like housing, that bubble has now burst.”
- Richard Hayne, Urban Outfitters CEO, March 2017
The devastation in the US retail sector is accelerating in 2017, and in addition to the surging number of brick and mortar retail bankruptcies, it is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the soaring number of store closures.
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
You are not an investor. One can only be an investor in functioning markets. There have been no functioning markets since at least 2008, and probably much longer. That’s when central banks started purchasing financial assets, for real, which means that is also the point when price discovery died. And without price discovery no market can function.
Three weeks ago we introduced the real "50 Cent" - the mystery trader whose pattern of huge, near-daily trades on the VIX is turning heads in the options market.
Not him..
As we detailed previously, Pravit Chintawongvanich, head of risk strategy at Macro Risk Advisors, the huge options buyer known as "50 Cent" shows no signs of slowing down.
One month after a startling reversion by the G-20 finance ministers and central bankers, who during their latest meeting in Baden-Baden dropped a decade-long tradition of rejecting protectionism and endorsing free trade, pressured by Trump's delegate Steven Mnuchin, the IMF has done the same, and according to a communique from the IMF’s steering committee released on Saturday in Washington echoed the G-20 reversal, and said that officials “are working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies" while omitting a call from its last statement in October to “resist all for