Business

William White is one of the world's top economists.

He was the head economist for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) - the world's most prestigious financial institution, called the "central banks' central bank - comprised of the world's central banks.  He is now the chief economist for OECD, made up of most of the world's richest and most powerful countries.

As chief economist for BIS, White predicted the 2008 crash.

If you shop online with Asda supermarket then a cyber security flaw might have left your personal details exposed to hackers looking to steal your identity and bank details. Trusted Reviews reports: A vulnerability on Asda’s website left countless customers’ personal data exposed. The flaw was spotted by security expert Paul Moore, who says that because Asda currently processes north of 200,000 online orders each week, over 19 million transactions could have been at risk. Moore says he first spotted the problem as far back as March 2014, and let Walmart-owned Asda know about the issue.

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