The Fed's Bill Dudley just unleashed the most cognitively dissonant statement of his career. That superlative is highlighted by theses two headlines:
Try telling The BoJ's Kuroda that!!
Nope - no consequence at all...
Yet again his comments confirm The Fed's utter confusion...
Today:
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.