Business

Almost one month ago, when the market was well lower and the VIX was quite a bit higher, we shared some "Bad News For The Bears: Gartman Will Be Long VIX Until The S&P Hits 2,118" which led us to conclude "Gartman has basically doomed the market to soar back to its all time highs. Sorry bears."

We were curious how Gartman is faring during this latest dramatic rout to his bearish stance. Here is what he said in his latest report:

After a significant draw the previous week, API reported a large 6.22mm build overnight, now confirmed by DOE with a 6.63mm build. Cushing was expected to see a considerable draw due to the outage at TransCanada's Keystone crude pipeline outage and was almost triple expectations (-1.76mm vs -610k exp). A larger than expected draw in gasoline inventories and build in Distillates was also evident as Production data fell for the 11th week of the last 12 to the lowest since Oct 2014. Oil prices are tumbling...

Genscape:

Bradley Birkenfeld is one of the most significant financial whistleblowers of all time, so you might think he’d be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. However, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is currently shaking political regimes around the world and believes the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by the U.S.

Perhaps the biggest farce to result from the Dodd-Frank legislation designed to "rein in" banks was the ridiculous notion of "living wills" -  a concept that makes zero sense in an environment where the failure of even one bank assures a systemic crisis and could - as the Lehman financial crisis showed - lead to the collapse of all other interlinked financial institutions.

Business inventory-to-sales ratio pushes to new deeply recessionary cycle highs at 1.41x...

As inventories met expectations of a modest 0.1% drop MoM in February but sales tumbled 0.4%.

Auto inventories rose 1.3% - the most since Sept 2015 (but sales were unchanged as opposed to +1.4% in Sept 2015). The breakdown is ugly across the board...

Q1 GDP takes a double whammy as not only did inventories drop (and recent gains were revised lower) but sales tumbled.