Business

Excerpted from Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin,

Another unsettled week for global markets. Japan’s Nikkei equities index rallied 6.5%. Italian bank stocks surged 10%, with the Europe STOXX 600 Bank Index up 8.1%. Germany’s DAX equities index rallied 4.5%, with Spanish stocks up 5.0% and Italian 4.3%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Financials index surged 5.9%. The EM market rally continued. U.S. bank stocks jumped 7.0%. A Friday evening Bloomberg headline: “Rough Week for Shorts as Banks Send S&P 500 to Four-Month High.”

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: