On Tuesday, we got the answer (or at least a partial answer) to the question we posed last month when we asked the following: “How long before the impairments and charges currently targeting smaller firms finally shift to the bigger ones? And how underreserved is JPMorgan for that eventuality?”
It was just three days ago when we brought you what we called “the next shoe to drop:” CLOs.
The market for collateralized loan obligations dried up completely in the wake of the crisis, as just about the last thing anyone wanted anything at all to do with was paper “secured” by leveraged loans.
Two weeks ago, on one of the slides in a Morgan Stanley presentation, we found something which we thought was quite disturbing. According to the bank's head of EMEA research Huw van Steenis, while in Davos, he sat "next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers' secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe.
Todays “Chart of the Day” from The Economist makes an attempt to show that gold isn’t doing any better when it comes to preserving buying power than currencies such as the Swiss Franc (CHF) or the Japanese Yen (JPY). Roy Sebag, co-founder of BitGold and CEO of GoldMoney, took the liberty to point out the obvious (and many) flaws in their chart (see his comments below):
Submitted by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,
“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!”
I’m often reminded of these words, spoken by the great comedian George Carlin, when I read about the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.