Business

If you have been long US stocks since Election night, you have been a Yen bear and nothing else.

Last September the Bank of Japan announced a new policy of targeting a 0% yield on its 10-Year Japanese Government Bonds. Many in the investment community took this to represent a “tightening” of policy.

It was no such thing.

Targeting a 0% rate on 10-Year JGBs opens the door to unlimited currency devaluation as the Bank of Japan prints Yen to buy JGBs.

Note the collapse of the Yen that followed this announcement.

By Wolf Richter of Wolf Street

Ballooning Condo Glut ensnares preconstruction speculators.

Miami-Dade’s spectacular condo flipping mania is in turmoil, with sales plunging, inventory-for-sale soaring, and new supply flooding the market. It’s not like Miami hasn’t been through this before.

In February, existing home sales of all types fell 10% year-over-year, to 1,835 homes. These sales “do not include Miami’s multi-billion dollar new construction condo market,” the Miami Association of Realtors clarified in its report on March 23.

Last week, the Office for National Statistics released the inflation results for the British economy. Even though most analysts weren’t expecting any huge differences, the numbers (updated until February) paint a completely different picture. In February, the inflation rate increased rather sharply. On a month-on-month basis, the CPI increased by 0.7% (whereas January was a month with deflation). The current YoY inflation rate based on the CPI is 2.3%.

‘No big deal’, you might think. But in this case it is.

Having failed to "rebalance" the oil market in the first six months following the implementation of the Vienna production cut agreement, with crude inventories in the US hitting all time highs in the interim...

Following the worst week for stocks since the US election, the reflation trade that was launched by the Trump election now appears solidly dead, with the dollar and commodities sliding, inflation expectations crumbling, and junk bonds - where investor euphoria had reached dramatic proportions - being hit the hardest. As Bank of America commented last Thursday, "the last few weeks we have seen wobbles in high yield; a full 2 months earlier than we anticipated.