Business

Authored Doug Kass of Seabreeze Partners Management,

"The missing step in the standard Keynesian theory [is] the explicit consideration of capitalist finance within a cyclical and speculative context . . . finance sets the pace for the economy. As recovery approaches full employment . . . soothsayers will proclaim that the business cycle has been banished [and] debts can be taken on . . . But in truth neither the boom, nor the debt deflation... and certainly not a recovery can go on forever. Each state nurtures forces that lead to its own destruction. "

While most financial professionals would enjoy nothing more than to trade bitcoin all day long - after all it only goes up in the long run (for now), while bringing insane volatility with it - the reality for most is that they are confined to such boring, established legacy instruments as Treasurys, which rarely have intraday fireworks similar to those in bitcoin.

Over the weekend we warned that just as everyone was convinced that the yield curve can only flatten from here, and was positioned massively on the long side of the 30Y future, the opposite was about to happen, and in a tweet highlighting the record net spec long positioning in 30Y futures, we said "here comes the mega steepener."

Here comes the mega steepener pic.twitter.com/OHqmX4HzMA

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 17, 2017

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,

Moody's estimates that there is roughly $1.4 trillion dollars belonging to U.S. corporations that has been building up in foreign bank accounts for years now to avoid the 35% corporate tax that would be levied on them if they were brought back to the U.S.  Of course, getting that $1.4 trillion back to the U.S. has been a critical component of the Trump administration's tax reform bill as Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin have repeatedly argued that the money would be put to good use building factories and creating jobs for American workers.