Business

As noted earlier, among the catalysts for the overnight leg higher in oil was a statement by Venezuelan Oil Minister Eulogio Del Pino who triggered the headline-scanning algos yesterday when he said, during a television broadcast on TeleSur, that oil producing countries were discussing a March meeting site (which apparently is sufficient to instill confidence in future cuts), and that Venezuela, Russia, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are planning to meet in July. He added that "There’s no capacity to continue putting oil on the market.

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“I haven’t found any nuggets of good news.”

That’s from Investec’s Ian Gordon, who isn’t particularly enamored with RBS, which on Friday reported its eighth consecutive annual loss.

The bank - which was bailed out to the tune of $64 billion by British taxpayers during the depths of the crisis - lost $2.77 billion last year, which was actually a marked improvement from 2014. Pre-tax profit which strips away all of the bad things like litigation plunged by nearly a third to £4.4 billion, just shy of consensus.

Whether this week's market surge was catalyzed by two consecutive "technical problems" in the bond market, first the unexpected failure of the Fed's MBS POMO on Wednesday and then the 7 Year Treasury auction's last minute cancellations yesterday, and quite clearly it was...

... is irrelevant as the short squeeze has not only returned with a vengeance...

... but the critical 1,950 resistance and 50 DMA in the S&P500 was taken out...

For the first time since Gold suffered a "death cross" in 2014, the largest 3-week inflows into gold funds since June 2009 have set up a so-called bullish "golden cross" pattern in the precious metal.

On the week, BofA's Michael Hartnett reports big precious metals inflows of $2.6bn as investors flee from stocks (equity outflows of $2.7bn).