Business

The South African Rand erased its advance to become the worst performer in emerging markets after we detailed earlier that President Jacob Zuma ordered an international investor roadshow aborted - serving as a wake-up call to the country’s political risks.

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas, were instructed to pull out of meetings in London and the U.S. with investors and ratings companies, the presidency said in a statement Monday, without giving a reason.

Monday's session started off poorly, with one of the biggest pre-opening selloffs of 2017 on fears surrounding the implementation of Trump's fiscal agenda. Since then, however, the Friday gap has been almost filled as a new batch of "buy the dippers" came out and did what they have done so well over the past 8 years.

As we have repeatedly warned since mid-December, the “Trump trade” was based on hype.

This is not to say that President Trump will not succeed in generating economic growth… it IS to say that whatever growth is coming will do so in 2018 as opposed to the GDP growth of 5% that the market seemed to believe would be hitting in early 2017.

With that in mind, consider the following charts.

Freeport McMoRan (FCX) is a copper producer. As such this company is extremely tied to economic growth.

Following disappointing Manufacturing and Services PMIs last week, this week has not started well for the hope embedded in 'soft' survey data. After six straight months higher, The Dallas Fed Manufacturing Outlook slumped in March (down 7.6pts to 16.9). This is the biggest drop since Jan 2016 and was lower than all estimates.

New Orders, Inventories, and number of employees all tumbled. Prices Paid and Received fell (but the latter consierably more than the former).

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

While the Japanese and Swiss central banks have turned themselves into hedge funds by loading up on equities, the US Fed has stuck to supporting the stock market indirectly, by buying bonds. It’s worked, obviously, with all major US indexes at record highs. But it won’t work going forward, thanks to two gathering trends.