Business

It was all too easy there eh? Never. Gets. Old...

The US Open and NYMEX Close were the triggers today...

Stocks did not go higher today confounding business TV anchors worldwide...

“Peer-to-peer lending is probably a bad idea,” we wrote, earlier this month. “Securitizing peer-to-peer loans is definitely a bad idea,” we added.

The P2P space has witnessed monumental growth over the past several years. P2P platforms lent over $12 billion in 2015 alone and as we documented last summer, Wall Street is supercharging the space by securitizing the loans.

Via Scotiabank's Guy Haselmann,

A well-known central banker once said to me, “if you don’t have a Plan B, then you don’t have a plan”.  When he spoke those words over a year ago, he was referring to the Fed’s lack of an exit strategy from zero rates and its QE-swollen balance sheet. He was telling me that the Fed was so focused on bettering ‘today’ through aggressive stimulus that it could not worry about ‘tomorrow’. He speculated that central banks were “terrified of looking as if they were doing too little”.

Amid last Thursday's cataclysmically illiquid flash-crash like collapse in Treasury yields, speculators in extreme net short positions reached for anything to hedge their positions. Most remarkably, call-buying (i.e. betting on / hedging lower yields) relative to put-buying exploded to a record skew. It would appear that the utter panic protection positioning is being unwound in the last few days and that has dragged yields considerably higher.

In the new bifurcated normal US economy, with the manufacturing sector unofficially in recession, it has been the growth of the services sector, and, as we detailed here, implicitly the surge in "bartenders & waiters" jobs, has saved the government's "recovery" statistics in the last few years. Given the recent performance of the National Retail Association's Restaurant Performance Index, the jobs recovery 'party' just ended.

Since December 2007, it is clear where the jobs gains have been...