Business

After an unprecedented surge in Chinese attempts to stimulate the economy in late 2015, mostly on the fiscal side, coupled with recent monetary easing by the PBOC which cut the banks' reserve ratio recently and unleashed a tsunami of new loan creation in January, many expected that this unprecedented credit impulse would translate into at least a modest rebound for the economy, prompting a stable pick up in spending for the economy which many are touting is now consumer-spending driven as opposed to export and production.

Submitted by Bill Bonner via InternationalMan.com,

Are you ready to pay to save?

 

Agora founder Bill Bonner explains why “negative interest rates” are spreading around the world…and could soon come to the U.S.

 

Like Doug Casey, Bill believes the worst is yet to come.

 

Two weeks ago, when we did our latest analysis of GAAP and non-GAAP earnings, we were stunned by several findings:

First, consensus Q1 2016 non-GAAP earnings, the kind that even Warren Buffett openly rails against, have imploded from +5% to -8.3% (this was "only" -7.4% two weeks ago), and more than double the -3.4% plunge in Q4 2015 EPS.

Keep in mind that all of the above is on a non-GAAP basis, and if one looks at GAAP earnings, the picture goes from dire to absolutely disastrous. 

In a historic first, earlier today ECB vice president Vitor Constancio (the same one who in October 2014 explained that the European stress tests refuse to consider a scenario with deflation  "because indeed we don't consider that deflation is going to happen" just a few months before Europe got its first deflationary print since the crisis) penned an official ECB opinion piece, some might call it a blog post, titled "In Defense of Monetary Policy" just hours after the ECB's historic "all in" gamble which included the first ever monetization of corporate b

Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,