Business

In early October, when speaking before the NY Fed, Bridgewater's Ray Dalio made a prophetic warning: a 1% rise in yields from near-record low level would trigger "the worst decline in bonds since the 1981 bond market crash." Less than two months later he has been proven right because while we have yet to see a move quite as large as the one Dalio envisioned, the November surge in global yields has already resulted in the worst monthly loss in the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Total Return Index, which lost 4% in November, the deepest slump since the gauge’s inception in 1990, and equi

Corporate tax reform has been a key policy initiative of Trump's as he has called for slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% down to 15%.  While this is welcome news for most companies, it would result in some fairly staggering writedowns for Wall Street's largest banks that amassed substantial net operating losses in 2008 and 2009.

According to Bloomberg, Citibank would be hardest hit with writedowns that could hit earnings for up to $12 billion or more. 

Submitted by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

The market should not be overly enthusiastic over today’s oil price surge on reports that OPEC has managed to reach some kind of a deal to reduce supply, David Hunt, chief executive at asset manager PGIM, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday.

http://www.bloomberg.com/api/embed/iframe

Hunt, CEO of the asset management group that manages US$1 trillion in assets, said the oil price surge today is “probably not” sustainable.

Industrial metals commodity prices plunged by the most since March in the last 2 days as China’s exchanges (once again) clamped down on speculation by tightening trading rules. As Bloomberg reports, for the second time this year, trading has exploded on the nation’s exchanges, pushing prices of everything from zinc to coal to multi-year highs and sending authorities scrambling to deflate the bubble before it bursts.

To our complete shock, the Government Accountability Office has released a report blasting the Education Department's understanding of basic mathematics and accounting concepts after finding the department drastically underestimated the costs of Obama's student loan forgiveness programs.  The 100-page report entitled "Federal Student Loans:  Education Needs to Improve Its Income Driven Repayment Plan Budget Estimates" found that taxpayers could be on the hook for $137BN of student loans to be forgiven over the coming years as a result of Obama's executive actions on