“The dollar rally is far from over,” Goldman’s Robin Brooks said, just hours before this week’s FOMC announcement.
“We expect the Fed to signal that it wants to continue normalizing policy, which means three hikes this year and four in 2017,” Brooks continued. “Overall, our sense is that the outcome will be more hawkish than market pricing.”
Earlier this month, a reader noticed something rather disturbing. Piraeus Bank seemed to have added a new line item in one of its reports and that new line item appeared to suggest that the bank was set to charge customers for exchanging €500 notes for smaller bills.
And it wasn’t just Piraeus. Other Greek banks looked to be doing something similar.
Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,
From June 2014 until late January 2015, oil prices (WTI) fell about 60%. From June 2015 until late January 2016, oil prices (WTI) fell about 60%.
The exact track each annual trading history took to achieve those results is different (2014-15 much more straight ahead and persistent; 2015-16 jagged and irregular), but you can’t deny the repetition in both the amount of time and the ultimate scale of the collapse.
Eight years of unconventional monetary policy, NIRP, ZIRP, QE, and asset bubbles as far as the eye can see, but where is that all important product of successful monetary policy - at least in a conventional Keynesian sense, where a steady increase in the cost of living and the loss of purchasing power is defined as success - namely inflation?
Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
If you haven’t seen the 2015 Best Picture nominee, The Big Short, I strongly recommend it.
The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis’ book which examines how such an extraordinary financial crisis gripped the world in 2008, and the handful of people who saw it coming.
The movie opens asking a very simple question about the global financial meltdown: