Business

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:

• Industrial Production +5.9% (MISS vs +6.0% YoY expectations)
• Retail Sales +11.1% (MISS vs +11.3% YoY expectations)
• Fixed Asset Investment +10.0% (MISS vs +10.2% YoY expectations),
• Q4 GDP growth +6.8% (MISS vs +6.9% YoY expectations).

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

Following China's growth slowing to 1999 levels in Q3 (but beating expectations with the mirage of a mysteriously large drop in the deflator), all eyes were on tonight's data, most notably the deflator (especially following the trade data debacle from last week).

Submityted by Jeff Desjardins vai The Visual Capitalist,

“I think ageing demographics is a bigger issue in China than people think. And the problems it creates should be become evident as early as 2016.” – Stan Druckenmiller, a 2013 quote

Over the last year, we’ve been very skeptical of the near-term potential for robust global economic growth.