Business

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

Authored by Attain Capital, via Valuewalk.com,

While many investors may be breathing a sigh of relief thanks to the bounce off the February low, with the S&P up 11% since the start of February – it’s still not all lollipops and rainbows out there in market-land. There’s some worrying undercurrents that could spell more trouble ahead, not to mention pros like Jeff Gundlach claiming there’s just 2% of upside in the S&P 500 and 20% downside.

After January's record-smashing CNY3.4 trillion (half a trillion dollars!) surge in aggregate credit expansion in China, the post-lunar-new-year hangover hit hard in February as credit growth tumbled 77% from Janaury's level to just CNY780 ($112bn). This is the weakest February loan growth since 2011. Drastically missing expectations, and following authorities comments on the need to "monitor" excess credit growth, all categories of total social finance registered a sharp drop.

Submitted by Julianne Geiger via OilPrice.com,

Moody’s Investors Service placed 11 West Texas governments and municipalities under review for a potential downgrade last week.

The review will consider downgrading the credit ratings of 11 local governments, which include Odessa and Midland, Pecos County, and 7 hospital districts. The review would affect US$477 million in outstanding public debt.

Everyone knows a downgrade is bad news, but how bad is bad—really?

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

The Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) wins the prize as the world’s worst central bank – at least for the time being.  Venezuela’s annual inflation has been in triple-digit territory for more than three years.  As the accompanying chart shows, the implied annual inflation rate soared as high as 800% last summer.  Since then, inflation has fallen to its current 320% annual rate.  This is still well above the phony 180.9% annual rate reported by the BCV in December.