Business

First, it was The BoJ's utter collapse from omnipotence to impotence. Then came the collapse of The Fed's credibility in the short-term.... and the longer-term. And now it is the turn of Mario Draghi's ECB to face total failure, as the European banking system - the prime beneficiary of "whatever it takes" - has crashed back to pre-Draghi levels.

As former Morgan Stanley guru Gerard Minack explains, the most corrosive factor for markets currently is the downgrading of perceived central bank potency.

By now all of our readers should be familiar with JPM's head quant Marko Kolanovic whose unblemished track record of accurate market calls is not only second to none, but is the equivalent in absolute value terms of Dennis Gartman's consistently wrong calls, which is why we won't spend time introducing him.

Instead we cut right to the chase with the highlights of his latest note released moments before the market close today, in which he lays out the biggest risks to the market, which are as follows:

Day after day we are told that the plunge in oil prices (just like the collapse in The Baltic Dry freight index) is a "supply" issue... it's transitory and global demand is doing fine thank you very much. Sadly, as everyone really knows deep down inside their Keynesian hearts, this is utter crap and as Barclays shows the shocking 18% YoY crash in distillates "demand" - something that has never happened outside of a recession - blows the one-sided argument of the energy complex out of the water.

Still gonna claim "it's a supply issue?"

Neither USDJPY nor Japanese stocks can hold a bid in the early going in Asia markets which has dragged both into the red post-QQE2. Since Kuroda took over from The Fed by doubling down on his cunning plan in October 2014, Japanese stocks are down 11.4%, USDJPY is unchanged, and only Japanese bonds have made any gains (up 3.7%).

So what we want to know is - how will Abe et al. explain to the Japanese people how they lost so much of their retirement funds by forcing GPIF to allocate so much to stocks?

Late last month, HSBC Holdings CEO Stuart Gulliver announced a global freeze on hiring and compensation in a move designed to help the bank cut some $5 billion in costs by the end of next year.

To be sure, HSBC isn’t alone in seeking to roll back costs amid bouts of global market turmoil. As Bloomberg notes, “UBS froze investment bank salaries this week and Barclays Plc extended a freeze on hiring new staff indefinitely in December, while Credit Suisse Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG are cutting thousands of jobs.”