Business

With China closing the morning session limit down, US equity futures are extending their losses (even though crude futures are holding some of their gains). The initial knee-jerk jump as crude rose on Saudi tensions has been entirely erased and Dow Futures are now down 300 points from New Year's Eve highs... Happy New Year.

China closed the morning session "not off the lows" with a bloodbath in ChiNext and Shenzhen...

With Offshore Yuan crashing over 440 pips - the most since the August deval...

Earlier in the session, after the surge in oil prices on fears of a spike in belligerence between Saudi Arabia and Iran, bulls were hopeful that after a poor close to 2015, at least the first trading day of 2016 would set a positive mood: after all, if there is one thing war is good for, it is to lift stock markets. And it did... for about 3 hours.

Authored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, publish op-ed via The Wall Street Journal,

Worry less about the banking system, but commodities, epidemics and climate volatility could be trouble

How should we think about financial risks in 2016? 

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

How do you make money in a world where history is meaningless? The answer, for a growing number of big fund managers, is that you don’t.

Hedge funds, generally the most aggressive species of money manager, do a lot of “black box” trading in which bets are placed on previously-identified patterns and relationships on the assumption that those patterns will repeat in the future.

As Wilbur Ross so eloquently noted, for Puerto Rico "it's the end of the beginning... and the beginning of the end," as he explained "Puerto Rico is the US version of Greece." However, as JPMorgan explains, for some states the pain is really just beginning as Municipal bond risk will only become more important over time, as assets of some severely underfunded plans are gradually depleted.

Wilbur Ross discusses Puerto Rico's debt struggles and where it goes from here...

http://www.bloomberg.com/api/embed/iframe