Business

Stocks are rolling over.

As we wrote about earlier this week, the S&P 500 was pushing for a final “kiss” of the broken bearish rising wedge pattern:

The next move should see us drop sharply.

Big picture stocks have effectively gone nowhere since QE 3 ended in November 2014. Yes it’s been a volatile ride, but all things considered stocks have largely traded sideways for 16 months.

Meanwhile, beneath this veneer of stability, the global economy has fallen off a cliff.

Last year (2015) marked the worst year for global trade since the Great Crisis.

ISIS ‘Department of Artifacts’ documents reveal trade of looted Syrian cultural treasures via well-established oil and weapon smuggling routes with Turkey. An RT Documentary crew investigating illicit oil smuggling by ISIS via Turkey have come across new documents shedding light on Islamic State’s lucrative trade in looted antiquities. Russia Today reports: There is no official accounting that would illustrate the true scale of looting being undertaken in Syria, a land once rich with cultural treasures.

For Japan, the post "Shanghai Summit" world is turning ugly, fast, because as a result of the sliding dollar, a key demand of China which has been delighted by the recent dovish words and actions of Janet Yellen, both Japan's and Europe's stock markets have been sacrificed at the whims of their suddenly soaring currencies. Which is why when Japanese stocks tumbled the most in 7 weeks, sinking 3.5%, to a one month low of 16,164 (after the Yen continued strengthening and the Tankan confidence index plunged to a 3 year low) it was anything but an April fool's joke to both local traders.

Submitted by Etai Friedman via Palisade-Research.com,

After the stock market crash of 1987, The Federal Reserve embarked on a path that led to the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. The day after the 1987 crash (Oct. 20, 1987) Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed, announced to the world that The Fed stood ready to provide whatever liquidity was needed by the banking system to prevent the crash from turning into a systemic financial crisis. That was the day the Fed “put” was born.

The last few weeks have seen Hong Kong's Hang Seng index surge over 14% which - if one believes the mainstream media - must mean renewed confidence in world economic growth and that everything is awesome. However, that narrative just got destroyed as Hong Kong retail sales in February just crashed by the most since 1999 as fewer Chinese tourists visited the city during the Lunar New Year holiday and as one analyst warned, sales will "continue to fall for the rest of 2016 as all the negative factors won’t be solved in the near term."