Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
We’ve only really been in two weeks of trading in the new year, things are looking pretty bad to say the least, so predictably the press are asking -and often answering- questions about when the slump will be over. Rebound, recovery, the usual terminology. When will we get back to growth?
In the aftermath of Citi and JPM's earnings last week, the only thing investors wanted to know about when it came to the just released Bank of America earnings moments ago, was the bank's energy exposure, and we'll get to that in a second, but first here are the housekeeping items.
On Monday, we noted with some incredulity that North Dakota Sour - a high-sulfur grade of crude - was briefly going for -$0.50 at the Koch brothers' Flint Hills Resources refining arm.
That’s not a misprint. If you had yourself some North Dakota Sour, you’d have to pay a refinery to take it off your hands. Your product was worth less than nothing.
We use the past tense there because once Bloomberg broke the story, Flint Hills quickly replaced the negative number with a positive one - you can now get $1.50.
Only the most intellectually dishonest can claim that last night's Chinese economic data deluge was anything but miserable. As we showed last night, everything missed:
Even as the real full year GDP of 6.9% was in line, it was still the lowest since 1990...
- 2015 and start 2016 “worrying” for markets- Gold’s long term performance strong in all currencies (see table)- “Improved performance in market for gold coins”- “Demand for U.S. Mint issued gold coins rose 45.6% y/y in weight terms”- “2015 the third busiest year over the last ten years”- Gold has key role of a major diversifier in portfolios