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One week after the BIS issued an unexpectedly stern, if completely ignored warning, that the surge in the USD is leading to an abrupt tightening in financial conditions around the globe, making the repayment of trillions in USD-denominated cross-border debt increasingly more difficult and suggesting that the Dollar index itself is the new "fear indicator", overnight another central bank, the European Central Bank warned that the risk of "abrupt" global asset market corrections "have intensified" on the back of rising political uncertainty, posing a threat to banks, stability and economi

While most global equity markets were subdued due to the US Thaksgiving holiday, the FX world was very busy overnight, marked by the relentless dollar surge on expectations of a rate hike not only in December but further in 2017, sending Asian currencies to the weakest level in 7 years: the Bloomberg-JPMorgan Asia Dollar Index reached 103.32, the lowest level since March 2009.

Submitted by Koos Jansen from BullionStar.com.

More proof the "precious metals assets" on Chinese commercial bank balance sheets have little to do with the “surplus” gold in China's domestic market.

Originally posted at ChinaDaily.com,

Recently, the Chinese currency fell to its lowest level since late 2008. The renminbi has been trading around 6.92 to the US dollar. The plunge is typically explained with the anticipated US Federal Reserve rate increase in December and president-elect Donald Trump's threat to label China a currency manipulator and slap tariffs on Chinese exports.

In reality, there is much more to the story.

Having exploded higher in the run-up to the election, market expectations of the correlation between stocks within the S&P 500 have completely collapsed since to new record lows.

Simply put, massive systemic overlays were placed ahead of the election event, and were forced to be unwound increasingly aggressively as the post-Trump rally caught everyone offside (the unwind would mean relatively heavy selling of Index protection relative to single-name protection).