Business

Via Simon Black of SovereignMan.com,

It’s my usual custom whenever I land at a major airport to stop by the rental car counters and inquire how much it costs to rent a vehicle.

For me this is a sort of informal, albeit imperfect, economic indicator.

High prices suggest strong demand from plenty of business travelers and tourists, which will likely have a positive economic impact.

Cheap prices, conversely, suggest that there’s something wrong.

Well, there’s definitely something wrong in Mexico.

By EconMatters

It appears David Stockman's warnings over the looming debt ceiling debacle has sparked some investors to face up to reality once again. The Treasury-Bill yield curve has inverted further and swap spreads soared to five-year highs.

With bond and stock markets having recently bifurcated, signalling two distinctly different outlooks on the future of the reflation trade, the confusion among the "smartest money" persists.

Close up this looks even more divergent.

Friday was the 6th day in a row that The Dow and the Long Bond have
risen in price together... equal record longest streak (1989 and 1994)

One and a half years after the Chinese government violently burst the stock market bubble, leading the massive losses among retail investors, and months after China's third housing bubble since the financial crisis appeared to have peaked, also China has found itself with yet another hot-money funded bubble: commodities.