Business

After starting out strongly this morning, with DB stock trading just shy of $17/share, European banks have seen some weakness in the past hour following a report from Reuters, in which sources were cited as saying that there is "firm support for a deposit rate cut within the European Central Bank's Governing Council." While a year ago this would have sent European stocks soaring, this is no longer the case as explained by none other than Deutsche Bank last weekend:

After some stabilization into mid-2015, the ratio of business inventories-to-sales has surged as sales have disappointed and mal-investment-driven dreams have over-stocked. Business inventories rose 0.1% MoM in December (retail up 0.4%) and sales tumbled 0.6%.

Year-over-year, Inventories are now up 1.7% (led by retailers up 5.4%) while Sales are down 2.4% (led by Manufacturers down 5.1%)

Recession?

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Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

What NIRP communicates is: this sucker's going down, so sell everything and hoard your cash and precious metals.

The last hurrah of central banks is the negative interest rate policy--NIRP. The basic idea of NIRP is to punish savers so severely that households and businesses will be compelled to go blow whatever money they have on something--what the money is squandered on is of no importance to central banks.

There was hardly a blemish in today's retail sales report: the January numbers not only beat expectations across the board, including the all important control group which printed at 0.6% or the highest since May, but the December data was also revised notably higher. At first glance, great news for those who hope consumer spending is finally getting some traction from collapsing gasoline prices.

And yet, even a modestly deeper look below the strong retail sales headline numbers once again reveals just how this "across the board beat" was accomplished.