Business

It appears "Occupy Wall Street" is a thing again, and this time it's Donald Trump's fault.

Anyone who was wondering if the general population has noticed the abnormal concentration of Wall Streeters in general, and Goldman Sachs alumni in particular, in the Trump administration got their answer on Wednesday afternoon, when screaming protesters, chanting "Drain that Swamp", swarmed the lobby of Goldman Sachs' New York headquarters in opposition to the firm’s growing influence in Donald Trump’s administration.

Submitted by Dave Forest via OilPrice.com,

With 2016 now closed out, we’re getting the first looks at year-end data. And numbers from one nation in the energy space have been particularly eye-catching this week.

Russia.

Over the last 15 years, Russia vaulted upwards in oil and gas production — challenging for the world’s top producer of crude. A fact that’s especially critical given this big producer is a “rogue” nation that lies outside the purview of OPEC.

Earlier we showed what some of the more prominent sellside strategists thought of the FOMC's surprisingly hawkish (yet maybe not) December minutes. And now, to top off the Fed Minutes day, here is perhaps the only analysis that matters: that of Goldman Sachs, which notes that as we speculated in December when the Fed hiked, "the hawkish December FOMC statement and accompanying increase in median interest rate expectations were to some extent motivated by the possibility of easier fiscal policy–as opposed to a shift in the FOMC reaction function."

Crude prices remain lower since last week's inventory data indicated a surprise (albeit small) build (but bounced today). With expectations for a 2mm draw this week, API reported crude inventories plunged 7.431mm last week - the most since September. However, Gasoline and Distillates saw huge inventory builds (biggest since Jan 2016) and WTI prices whipsawed.

API

While we eagerly await the next installment of the McKinsey study on global releveraging, we noticed that in the latest report from the Institute for International Finance released on Wednesday, total debt as of Q3 2016 once again rose sharply, increasing by $11 trillion in the first 9 months of the year, hitting a new all time high of $217 trillion. As a result, late in 2016, global debt levels are now roughly 325% of the world's gross domestic product.