Business

Something surprising emerged in the latest Daily Treasury Statement report showing the sources and uses of operating cash of the US Treasury: the line item for Federal Reserve Earnings exploded to $19.3 billion on December 28, doubling the amount of cash the Fed had remitted to the Treasury for all of 2015.

This record, unprecedented one-day payment is shown in the chart below:

And just like that the Fed, also known as the printer of US currency, gave the Treasury a one time record bonus of $19 billion.

Earlier today, we noted that while the market was surging last week, the smart money was selling. This comes at the same time as ICI reported major redemptions from both stock ($3.9 billion) and bond ($4.5 billion) mutual funds, even as corporate buybacks were decelerating, leading to the question of just who was buying stocks during the Santa rally of the past two weeks.

2015's stock market range (from high to low) is among the narrowest since World War II. This 'compression' has led the horde of asset-gatherers and commission-takers to suggest that stocks are a "coiled spring" ready to burst higher from this newly-formed permanent plateau. However, as S&P Capital IQ's Sam Stoval notes, that is the exact opposite of what to expect based on history. In fact a narrow range year is typically followed by a low return year, not a high return year.

One month ago, Fidelity started a firestorm in the venture capital community when hot on the heels of recent downward revaluations of such pre-IPO unicorns as Dropbox, and Square, the world's second largest mutual fund (which had previously been accused of venturing where it shouldn't by buying stakes in private-stage companies and subsequently having to value them on its own) took an axe to some of its private company investments, in this case slashing the value of Snapchat, the fifth highest valued "unicorn", by 25%.

Submitted by Michael McDonald via OilPrice.com,