Business

Moments ago, for some unexplained reason, the St.Louis Fed - which recently issued a research report which "discovered" that "Consumers Across The Country Are Borrowing More To Buy Cars And Go To School" - on its twitter account asked a simple question: "See how the ECB's assets are growing?"

See how the European Central Bank's assets are growing https://t.co/cjQBj8y2VP pic.twitter.com/ozbnMU7Kh0

— St. Louis Fed (@stlouisfed) March 5, 2016

Women in New York have taken their “tampon tax” fight to court, suing over the taxation of feminine hygiene products. A group of women filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing New York of unlawfully taxing tampons and other feminine hygiene products. They accuse the state of double standards and gender discrimination and seek to bring an end to the “unlawful” tax and force refunds to five million women. RT reports: “A tax on tampons and sanitary pads is a tax on women. The Tampon Tax is irrational. It is discrimination.

Everything happening today is in some ways interconnected: popularity of ‘non-establishment’ political candidates; ineffectiveness of central bank policy in lifting inflation; economic pessimism; weak capital spending (from handcuffed capitalism); and angst due to perceptions of inequality.

Scotiabank's Guy Haselmann explains...

The cracks are starting to appear in the 'paper' gold market.

BlackRock's rather shocking decisision to halt ETF creation due to gold demand (i.e. being unable to source enough physical gold to meet mandated requirements given the inflows) follows the largest gold ETF inflows since Feb 2009 (just as The Fed started QE1 and unleashed trillions of freshly digitized exuberance into the markets).

How much louder can the “ban cash” calls get?

Recall it was just last year when we catalogued the growing cacophony of crazies for whom banning physcial currency is the only way to ensure that depositors can’t simply reassert their economic autonomy under a low or zero rate regime..

Put simply, if interest rates get too low, depositors will simply take their money out the bank and put it in the mattress or the safe where, to quote WSJ from last week, “interest rates are always low no matter what central bankers do.