With OPEC behind us, perhaps the market's focus will swing back to fundamentals (as opposed to headlines) and following last week's huge build across products, API reported the second week in a row of crude inventory draws (bigger than the expected 1.37mm drop). However, Gasoline and Distillates saw major builds but Cushing inventories rose over 4mm barrels - the most since 2008. WTI seemed to focus on the crude draw at first...
API
In what may be the most direct admission that China's economy is about to grind to a deflationary halt, today China's Global Times, a newspaper which is seen as a propaganda companion to the official People's Daily, revealed data showing this year's proposed salary guidelines according to which there is a broad wage growth declines in virtually every single province on the mainland, which according to the Chinese publication "confirms the country is experiencing an economic slowdown."
The consensus around 2017 being the year of the dollar has clear vulnerabilities, according to Bloomberg's Mark Cudmore, who notes that there’s a strong self-correcting impulse to dollar strength.
I’ve just returned from a week in New York that included meeting a number of FX traders from several different firms. And the one view that was repeated again and again, with conviction, was that next year will see the dollar roar.
On Tuesday afternoon, the billionaire founder and CEO of Japan's Softbank and was seen entering the Trump Tower, to meet with the President-elect. It appears that they had fruitful conversations, because just a few minutes later, Trump - who earlier in the day lambasted Boeing over charging too much for Air Force 1 sending its stock lower - tweeted some words of praise for the Japanese businessman.
Some perspectives on the fascinating economic experiment that is China from Eric Peters, CIO of One Asset Management, as told in his traditional third-person style.
Anecdote: “We’ve become anesthetized to the absurdity of Chinese growth,” said the CIO.
The accelerating rate of credit expansion relative to GDP has no precedent. “They’ve run off the cliff so fast that people seem to think they’ll actually make it to the other side.”