Business

Rig counts dropped for the 9th straight week but for the 3rd week in a row, US oil rig counts dropped heavily, down 26 this week after -28, and -31 in the last 2 weeks. The 85 rig drop is a 17% plunge over 3 weeks - the fastest pace since Feb 2015, and 2nd fastest since Feb 2009.

• U.S. OIL RIG COUNT DOWN 26 TO 413, BAKER HUGHES SAYS
• U.S. TOTAL RIG COUNT DOWN 27 TO 514 , BAKER HUGHES SAYS

Rig counts continue to track the lagged crude price perfectly...

Here is the regional breakdown:

The last few days have been "odd" according to one veteran trader and today's moves, with USDJPY plunging, S&P 'steady', and XIV (the inverse VIX ETF soaring) left the same trader exclaiming "what the hell is going on?" More unwinds from equity market-neutral funds? OPEX impacts? Or just the death-throes of a Fed-fueled market gasping its last breaths...

The chaos in equity market-neutral funds continues with weak/strong momo stocks extremely volatile this week...

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of The Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

On Thursday, Venezuela’s central bank released a long-overdue -- and little-trusted -- report claiming that the country’s inflation rate in 2015 was 180.9%.  Unfortunately, for the global community, as high as this figure sounds, it is way below the true inflation rate.

The efficient market theory is long dead, according to Bloomberg's Richard Breslow.

It was a brilliant academic construct. It fit the needs of those who wanted to explain markets to freshmen, make econometric models or make money from the knowledge that it wasn’t reality. An unfortunate problem arose, however, from how the counter-argument was framed. If markets weren’t efficient they must be irrational or biased. The truth is something very much in-between.

When it comes to following China's capital outflows, the traditional place to keep track has been China's official reserve data released monthly, which however as we showed previously can and often is manipulated to give the impression of generally smalle numbers. We noted one example in October when China disclosed an official outflow of $43 billion, yet this number was largely incomplete, and short of the total, due to the PBOC's recent adoption of using currency forwards to manipulate the Yuan, something not tracked by the official reserve number.