It’s not entirely clear whether Saudi Arabia knew what they were setting in motion when the kingdom moved to deliberately suppress crude prices at the end of 2014.
The idea (of course) was to preserve market share by bankrupting the US shale space and if there were “ancillary benefits” - like say forcing Moscow to give up its support for Bashar al-Assad - well then all the better.
The US markets are in a quandary.
On the one hand, some of the data (GDP growth, unemployment, etc.) suggests the Fed should continue to hike rates. On the other hand, other data points (food stamp usage, labor participation rate) suggest the US never actually entered a real recovery.
More importantly, how can the jobs data suggest such a strong employment situation… when one in seven Americans are on food stamps?
In a case of supreme poetic justice, the SEC probe into Valeant which was reported on Monday and which led to a 20% plunge in the price the company's shares and resulted in Pershing Square's -19.9% performance through the end of February, was started by Valeant itself following its request of an SEC investigation into short-seller Citron's claims which made the rounds last fall, and which were among the numerous catalysts that precipitated the historic drop in the price of VRX stock.
Bail-In Regulation To Blame For “Bank Turmoil” In EU?
The Financial Times recently looked at how the new bail-in resolutions in the EU, U.S. and most of the western world and asked whether they may be leading to "bank turmoil" and increased concerns about banks and the banking sector in the EU. As is typically the case with coverage of the bail-in regime, the important article was little noticed.
And the CapEx hits just keep on coming.
Two weeks after Goldman reported something troubling, namely that there is a massive gap of nearly 20% between sellside CapEx estimate for what US oil companies will spend on CapEx and what implied guidance suggests as shown in the table below...