The Cleveland Fed Financial Stress Index has been rising all year and just broke out to what The Fed describes as a "significant stress" period. The last two times this level of financial instability was breaking out across US markets Bernanke unleashed QE1 (Q1 2009) and Operation Twist (Q1 2012).
"Significant Stress" has been reached...
Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
That didn’t take long. We’ve just had another short-covering rip from the 1820 Bullard Bottom on the S&P 500 and it’s already petered out. Not even another one of the St. Louis Fed President’s bouncing billiard balls could keep the machines slamming the buy key.
"Get back to work, Mr.Draghi..."
Not only are stock markets (and bank bonds) collapsing, so is European consumer confidence...
Eurozone consumer confidence fell more than expected in February, the first estimate by the European Commission showed Friday. Consumer confidence in the euro area fell to -8.8 in February from -6.3 in January, the Commission said. The decline was much sharper than the fall to -6.8 forecast by economists surveyed by MNI.
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As we showed one week ago, it has been a deplorable year not only for the broader market, but for some of the marquee "hedge" fund names, who once again have shown they "hedge" only in name. We followed up with a report on the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, whose Pure Alpha strategy we further showed has gotten slammed in the first two weeks of February, losing a whopping 10% in half a month.
The latest Lipper fund flow data is an and it is not pretty: in the latest week, there was $12.2 billion in equity outflows, the largest weekly redemption in 5 months...
... and more importantly, this represents 7 straight weeks of outflows: the longest streak since 2008.
Concurrent with the flight from US equities, we have seen the biggest European equity redemptions since October 14: