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Only lowering our living standards will achieve sustainable growth. That’s the message from Satyajit Das, a former financier who anticipated the GFC. Debt, energy consumption, housing affordability or superannuation – it’s all based on a financial system that’s in fact a completely fictional model. This model was always doomed to fail – eventually.

Beyond growth as we know it – How can we stop consuming our future?

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Any hopes for an early rebound in oil following last week's torrid plunge in WTI and Brent appear to be dashed, at least at the open, when WTI promptly tumbled below $48/barrel.

While there have been no materal adverse catalysts over the weekend, three factors are being mentioned by Sunday night trading desks as drivers behind the latest seloff.

First: price momentum has simply persisted from the Friday US selloff, as Asian funds catch up to the US action. 

With the Fed expected to further tighten financial conditions following its now guaranteed March 15 rate hike, and the ECB recently announcing the tapering of its QE program from €80 to €60 billion monthly having run into a substantial scarcity of eligible collateral, the third big central bank - the BOJ - appears to have also quietly commenced its own monteary tightening because, as Bloomberg calculates looking at the BOJ's latest bond-purchase plan, the central bank is on track to miss an annual target, by a substantial margin, prompting investor concerns that the BOJ has commenced its ow

Over the weekend, Bank of America's volatility experts Jason Galazidis and his team, pointed out that while US equity vol remains at historic low levels, it is not just equities where market participants are remarkably complacent, and write that both US credit & Chinese equity hedges "are pricing a world almost free of risk."

Authored by Salmon Ghouri via OilPrice.com,

Time is of the essence. If you fail to comprehend future market conditions and fail to steer the ship in the right direction, it can lead to disaster. This is what we have learned during the past few years. OPEC’s failure to understand the future market conditions and speed of technological advancements has resulted in economic setbacks.