Having pounded the table on buybacks as the only marginal source of stock purchasing since some time in 2013, we were delighted one month ago when Bloomberg finally got it, writing an article titled "There's Only One Buyer Keeping S&P 500's Bull Market Alive." The answer: corporate stock repurchases of course.
This is what it found:
The FOMC minutes from the uberdovish March meeting were just released. Here are the highlights:
Following yesterday's API data, which showed the biggest draw of 2016 with a 4.6 million reduction in oil inventories, everyone was keenly looking forward to today's DOE data. Moments ago the DOE indeed confirmed the API data, reporting that in the past week oil inventories declined by 4.949MM, more than the API print, down from last week's 2.3MM and well below the expected 2.850MM increase.
This was the largest draw since the first week of January.
Residential real estate is a slippery slope for China (especially when this frequently recurring bubble is in its bursting phase) . A critical problem the country is dealing with right now is the fact that it is now confronted with the realization that blind construction spending, building out ghost cities year in and year out, has resulted in a glut of vacant housing. There are two main issues China faces with an oversupply of vacant housing. First, it means that new construction has been slow, ultimately putting downward pressure on GDP.
Almost exactly one month ago, on March 10,Mario Draghi unveiled his quadruple bazooka, which among other features, included the first ever monetization of corporate bonds (this has unleashed such an unprecedented scramble for European bonds that there are virtually none left in the open market leading to massive illiquidity and forcing yield chasers to sell CDS instead of buying bonds, thus laying the ground work for the next AIG debacle).