Business

We’ve written quite a bit about P2P or, more accurately, "marketplace" lending over the years.

Most recently, we noted that write-offs for five-year LendingClub loans were coming in at between 7% and 8% as opposed to the forecast range of between 4% and 6%. “Their business is to take data and use that to underwrite risk,” Compass Point’s Michael Tarkan told Bloomberg by phone. “If you’re an investor in the loans on the platform, this creates a concern around that underwriting model.”

In the aftermath of Friday's market "reassessment" and subsequent surge, when the ECB's "bazooka" was found quite stimulative for risk assets after all (as opposed to the Thursday post-kneejerk reaction) one would think that Goldman which still has a 2,100 year end target on the S&P500, would be delighted.

Submitted by Art Berman via ArtBerman.com,

Oil prices should fall, possibly hard, in coming weeks. That is because fundamentals do not support the present price.

Prices should fall to around $30 once the empty nature of an OPEC-plus-Russia production freeze is understood. A return to the grim reality of over-supply and the weakness of the world economy could push prices well into the $20s.

On Tuesday, Kuwait's oil minister Anas al-Saleh delivered a rather stark warning to the rest of OPEC when he said the following about the much ballyhooed crude output freeze: "I'll go full power if there's no agreement. Every barrel I produce I'll sell.”

If at first you don't succeed, keep trying to call the bottom in oil prices.

As Bloomberg writes, catching a falling knife is hard, especially when it’s covered in oil. The International Energy Agency today said oil prices may have bottomed out. Several people have tried to call the oil’s floor since prices started falling in the summer of 2014. So far nobody has been right.