Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
The casino is incorrigible. After a monumental short squeeze that has lifted the averages right into the jaws of danger, Goldman Sachs has the temerity to print the following:
“Our model suggests SPX calls are more attractive than at any time over the past 20 years”.
Any time a Fed president, governor or chairman trots out the trite cliche that the Fed is "apolitical" we can't help but laugh for one simple reason: not only is the Fed not apolitical, but is very closely ideologically tied with whichever party promotes deficit spending which by definition is inflationary: more deficits mean more debt, means more opportunity for the Fed to show off its "inflation" creating skills; and in a Keynesian world, a stable 2% inflation is the lubricant that drives and stabilizes the financial system - the Fed's true mandate.
The last 14 months have seen the biggest slump in small business confidence since the financial crisis. Despite being told about how great the recovery is by authorities, at 92.9, NFIB's optimism index has collapsed to its lowest in 2 years with weakness across the board - from hiring plans to capex spending to real sales expectation. There are two 'people' to blame for this according to NFIB's chief economist - The Fed ("dithering") and Obama ("disinclined to act favorably to small business.")
Not what The Fed wants...
Over the past week we have been following a disturbing development in the US Treasury market: while the repo rate on the 10Y has been sliding deep into negative territory for a while, on Friday it finally hit the "fails charge" of -3.00%, suggesting there is a massive shortage of Treasury paper as a result of wholesale shorting by various market participants.
Submitted by Artrhur Bermann via OilPrice.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.
A Production Freeze Will Not Reduce The Supply Surplus