Business

Is the party over?

In a shocking day for stock traders, US equity markets were unable to hold any gains today - despite a panic buying ramp in USDJPY at the close...

Banks have been lobbying intensively against Brexit. Among those leading the charge is Goldman Sachs. For three years, the bank’s executives have publicly warned about the downsides of leaving the EU... and now we know why (hint - it's not concern for the common man).

As The Wall Street Journal reports, about a decade ago, Goldman launched project “Armada,” a plan for a hulking European headquarters on the site of an old telephone exchange in London.

It has been a while since we had an update from JPM's "quant guru" Marko Kolanovic on key market support and resistance levels from the perspective of option gamma and key systematic strategies including CTAs, risk parity and volatility targeting, so we were looking forward to reading his latest report which came out earlier today. In it he reviews the latest flows and concludes that the suppressed realized vol regime we have enjoyed for the past two months may be about to shift, perhaps as soon as the coming Friday's option expiration.

From JPM's Marko Kolanovic

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

If you don’t think the current central bank driven economic and financial bubble is going to end badly, recall a crucial historical fact. To wit, the worldwide race of central banks to the zero bound and NIRP and their $10 trillion bond-buying spree during the last seven years was the brain child of Ben S Bernanke.

Following yesterday's bankruptcy of Peabody Energy and today's Chapter 11 filing of XXI Energy, defaults among American junk bonds just topped $14 billion in April, the highest monthly volume in two years according to Fitch calculations, and that is only for the first two weeks.

April's surge in bankruptcy filings is not unexpected: according to JPM's default tracker, the number of bankruptcies was on a tear in both the month of March and the first quarter.