King Dollar has been on a roll the past three years, as it has rallied over 40% since the 2011 lows. Below takes a look at the US$ over the past couple of years.
Let me make this clear, the trend in King Dollar remains up. The first chart reflects that the Dollar is attempting to breakout above dual rising channel resistance.
The highly compensated world of active fund managers continued to disintegrate before their eyes in the last week, when according to EPFR data even as overall cash continued to flood into equities for a total of $14.5 billion, the 11th consecutive week of inflows, this was entirely due to allocations to ETFs, which saw $19.7 billion in inflows, the highest weekly amount YTD, offset by $5.1 billion in outflows from actively managed funds.
During the FOMC press conference this week, Janet Yellen was pushed by Bloomberg's Kathleen Hays to explain why she hiked rates amid what was evidently not a surging economy.
While Q1 looks to be the weakest economic growth period for a rate hike since 1980, today we got some more confirming real-time 'hard' data confirming the facts that the US economy is anything but as strong and resilient as Yellen proclaimed it.
Industrial Production has never declined on a 24-month basis without the US economy being in recession...
After a brief jump in December, US industrial production was unchanged in February (thanks to tumble in utilities which offset modest manufacturing gains). Industrial Production peaked in the US in Nov 2014, as the US equity market took off after the end of QE3.
February saw Industrial production unchanged against expectations of a 0.2% MoM rise (and January was revised modestly higher).
But then again, when has real economic data mattered?
A quiet start to today's quad-witching St. Patrick's day, with European stocks mixed, Asian shares and U.S. index futures (-0.1%) little changed ahead of industrial production data with just Tiffany's set to report earnings.