Business

By now, not even CNBC's cheerleading permabulls can deny that the US is in a manufacturing recession: in fact, it is so bad that even the staunchest defenders of Keynesian dogma admit what we said in late 2014, namely that crashing oil is bad for the economy.

And yet, the "services" part of the US economy continues to hum right along, leading to such surprising outcomes as a stronger than expected print in Personal Consumption Expenditures. How can this be?

EURUSD just broke 80 pips lower instantaneously as it seems a somewhat delayed reaction to US GDP data sparked panic buying of USDollars (despite Fed Funds futures pricing in no more rate hikes in 2016). At 1.0855, EURUSD is testing the ket 50-day moving-average and is back below pre-Draghi levels...

EURUSD back below pre-Draghi levels...

As Rate-Hike odds for 2016 disappear in a puff of fed policy error...

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The fast money and robo-machines keep trying to ignite stock rallies, but they all fizzle because bad karma is beginning to infect the casino. That is, apprehension is growing among whatever adults are left on Wall Street that 84 months of ZIRP and $3.5 trillion of Fed balance sheet expansion, aka money printing, didn’t do the trick.

And so the final quarter of 2015 is in the history books and we can officially accuse the US Bureau of Economic Analysis of "peddling fiction" about the US recovery, because at a growth rate of 0.69%, the annualized rate of economic growth was the lowest since the first quarter of 2015 when it grew an almost identical 0.64% which was blamed on the harsh weather. This time however, there is no easy scapegoat.

The breakdown was as follows:

The quest to find a vaccine for the Zika virus is on as the World Health Organization announce the virus is spreading “explosively” and the National Institute for Health officially declare the outbreak to be pandemic. The vaccine funding is already in place…and so is worldwide fear. At least three pharmaceutical companies are either considering or actively pursing programs, including giants GlaxoSmithKline GSK , and Sanofi SNY. But the company that appears to be the farthest along is a relatively small $500 million market cap biotech named Inovio Pharmacuetucals.