Business

Submtted by C.Jay Engel via The Austrian View blog,

“Like champagne, bull markets remove inhibitions.” –James Grant

In early 2015, after seeing a staggering $1.4 trillion in Euro area government debt trade at negative interest rates (the number has since grown to $6 trillion) we wondered when the bailout of insolvent governments was going to make its way to other debtors. Our question was quickly answered when we found that a negative rate mortgage had been issued by Nordea Credit, a bank in Denmark. Recently, even the WSJ finally stumbled on this bizarre inversion of traditional borrower obligations.

Via NorthmanTrader.com,

By the SRSrocco Report

Something big happened in the gold market.  It was a stunning trend change in mainstream gold demand during the first quarter of the year.  This suggests investors are becoming increasingly worried about the stock markets and are looking for safety elsewhere.

Over the past several years, the gold market has suffered net outflows of metal from Gold ETF's & Funds.  However, this changed in a big way in Q1 2016:

The "Doha oil freeze deal" was a farce from the beginning.

It all started with a February 11 Hail Mary attempt by Venezuela to boost oil prices by launching a rumor that oil production would be frozen (ignoring that both Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are already pumping out a record output).

VENEZUELA OIL MIN PROPOSED OPEC, NON-OPEC ‘FREEZE’ PRODUCTION AT CURRENT LEVELS: RTRS. And Saudi Arabia laughed?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 11, 2016

Shockingly, it worked.