Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
On Wednesday, as I discussed yesterday, the Fed hiked rates and despite the fact that hiking interest rates further tightens monetary policy, thereby reducing liquidity to the markets, the markets rallied anyway.
A couple of research reports released overnight by Deutsche Bank and Bank of America, respectively, come to a sobering conclusion: the fate of the global economy may be in the hands of the Chinese housing bubble. As a reminder, China is a serial bubble inflator courtesy of a closed (capital account) economy, and nearly $30 trillion in bank deposits which slosh from one asset class to another, be it the stock market, bitcoin, commodities, farm animals or - most often - housing.
One. Big. Squeeze...
It was quite a week for 'uncertainty' as Europe's VIX crashed to record lows, and FX and Rate vols plunged after the Fed move and Dutch elections...
Last year Goldman Sachs entered into a settlement with federal and state governments over its role in packaging and selling toxic mortgage-backed securities in the housing meltdown to unsuspecting buyers while subsequently turning around and shorting those very same securities. As part of the settlement, Goldman agreed to provide $1.8 billion in homeowner debt relief to delinquent U.S. borrowers.
Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
Well, of course they bugged Trump Tower. Why wouldn’t they? Trump’s big blunder du jour is that he tweeted “wiretapped,” like some hapless sap out of a 1950s I Was a Spy for the FBI movie. (I know people who still say “ice box,” too.) So he left himself - or rather poor Sean Spicer - open for a week of legalistic pettifogging by reporters acting as litigators for the Deep State’s intel corps.