Business

Over the course of the last several weeks, we’ve spent quite a bit of time sounding the alarm bells on America’s growing list of bankrupt oil and gas drillers.

We’ve also been keen to point out that the long list of cash flow negative US producers has only managed to stay in business this long because Wall Street has thus far been willing to plug the sector’s funding gap with cheap financing thanks to ZIRP and investors’ insatiable demand for anything that looks like it might offer some semblance of yield.

Just before the US equity market topped out last August, none other than infamous stock-chart-extrapolator Laszlo Birinyi ventured on to CNBC and proclaimed that the S&P 500 will hit 3,200 by the end of 2017. Since the soprano uttered that extreme, US equity markets have collapsed not just once, but twice and now trade at levels first seen over two years ago...

Earlier today, Goldman's global macro strategist team led by Noah Weisberger released a report titled "Markets do not "Take it Easy" to start the year", which had one very disturbing slide, i.e., "Exhibit 8." - disturbing, because it showed that according to Goldman's Current Activity Indicator, the US was effectively in recession; certainly disturbing enough for us to immediately tweet it with just one comment: "Oops":

Oops from GS pic.twitter.com/jz0LCculCQ

Led by a broad-based collapse in financial stocks, European markets extended and accelerated their plunge today. Thanks to the increased systemic linkages enforced by The ECB, peripheral sovereign risk is spiking as their national banking systems crash. Every European nation is now in at least correction since the end of QE3.

Europe crashed today...

Led by utter carnage in financials...

On Tuesday in “Canada Set To Unleash Negative Rates As Oil Patch Dies, Depression Deepens,” we outlined the dilemma facing Stephen Poloz and the BOC.

If the central bank cuts rates and drives the loonie lower, Poloz may be able to keep the CAD price of WCS above the marginal cost of production and thus avoid shut-ins that would cost the Canadian economy still more oil patch jobs.