Business

As regular readers are no doubt acutely aware, Alberta is in trouble.

The province is at the heart of Canada’s dying oil patch and crude’s inexorable decline has had a devastating economic impact.

30% of provincial revenue is derived from resources and as crude collapsed, so did oil and gas investment. O&G spending plunged by more than a third in 2015 and as provincial authorities wrote in their latest fiscal update, “weakness in the oil and gas sector has spread to other sectors of the economy.”

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Critics of today’s fiat currency/fractional reserve banking world have (for what seems like forever) made the common sense point that when debt rises faster than cash flow, bad things are bound to happen. In every cycle since 1980 this has been dismissed by the vast majority who benefit from inflating bubbles — until the bubble bursts.

With European markets increasingly jittery on Italian bank concerns, now that after 7 years of build up those staggering Italian non-performing loans were finally noticed by traders, resulting in speculation that the creation of an Italian bad bank is imminent, overnight Citi's Azzurra Guelfi released a note trying to qualify just how exposed Italian banks are to rising bad loans, and quantify which banks have the most exposure.

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: