Business

For the 13th month in a row, The Dallas Fed Manufacturing Outlook was contractionary with a stunning -34.6 print following December's already disastrous collapse back to -20.1, post-crisis lows. With "hope" having plunged back into negative territory (-2.2) in December, January saw a complete collapse to -24.0 as one respondent exclaimed, "we expect the continued depression in the oil and gas industry to negatively impact our customer base and result in significant demand reduction."

Bloodbath...

It's midnight in Japan - so it makes perfect sense that this headline - SOME BOJ OFFICIALS ARE SAID TO VIEW MORE STIMULUS AS CLOSE CALL - would drop and spark a spike in USDJPY which in turn drives Crude oil and stocks surging higher...

Once again, as we detailed over the weekend, fundamentals are simply irrelevant:

While not as dire as his Davos forecast, in which he warned that "if assets remain correlated and things continue to move in the “wrong” direction, "there’ll be a depression", earlier today Ray Dalio released a new Op-Ed in the FT in which the manager of the world's largest hedge fund (excluding Apple's Breitburn of course), once again implores the Fed and other central banks to stop tightening and boost global easing.

Submitted by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

“Some very critical things are hidden.”

After the white-knuckle sell-off of global equities that was finally punctuated by a rally late last week, everyone wants to know: Was this the bottom for stocks? And now Moody’s weighs in with an unwelcome warning.

As we said two days ago when looking at the paltry recoveries on their total debt that bankrupt energy debtors are generating in liquidation and bankruptcy asset sales, "the energy bankruptcy party is only just starting." And sure enough, overnight we learned that another company is preparing to throw in the towel following a Reuters report that SandRidge Energy - a shale oil and gas producer in the Mid-Continent region of the U.S. - is exploring debt restructuring options, "as the heavily indebted U.S.