Ahead of tonight's API inventory data, WTI Crude prices wer fading after 5 straight days higher. That was until WSJ reports Saudi Arabia wants OPEC to extend production cuts, sending oil prices spiking higher...
For those looking toward the end of the week, today is "pro-forma" Wednesday, because this is a four day week as U.S. equity markets are closed for Good Friday. And, as Art Cashin writes in his overnight note, as "every year, the Good Friday close produces lots of erroneous theories about why we close. So, once again, we offer the explanation we wrote a few years back"
While too backward looking to be actionable (reflecting the labor situation with a 2 month delay) especially in a time when everyone is focused on the future - or lack thereof - of Trump's fiscal policies today's JOLTs report failed to capture the sharp slowdown in the March jobs report, instead corroborating the last of the "good" payroll prints, that of February.
So what did "Janet Yellen's favorite labor market indicator" show?
US financial stocks - the "no brainer" trade of so many TV talking heads - appear to have finally realized that the yield curve is not steepening and even deregulation may be further away than hoped.
Bank stocks are almost unchanged on the year - erasing gains of almost 10% after Trump's speech to Congress...
As the Treasury yield curve has collapsed to its flattest levels since October...
And remember, the stocks of the banks have totally decoupled from their credit market perception of risk...
Overnight, Bloomberg has posted the latest article in a long-running series of warnings about the dangers of China's, now $9 trillion - and fast approaching 100% of GDP - shadow banking system, which it says is playing a "game of chicken with investors", and which boils down to the following: if there is a high profile failure of any one of the countless wealth management product, or WMPs, which comprise the vast majority of China's shadow banking system, and if the government does not bail it out - as it has threatened on several occasions to do - there may be a mass "run on the shadow ban