Business

Today's market summed up...

The post-Christmas period started badly with a Bloodbath in Beijing... Biggest drop since August collapse

Despite the increasing perception of policy divergence between The US and the rest of the world, it appears 'factors beyond the control of the central planners' has stymied hope for any US-based sparking of global growth. Between The Fed's liquidity withdrawal and the deflationary tsunami from an emerging world buried in credit-fueled mal-investment, it is increasingly clear that central banks have lost control and everything is now going down together.

Submitted by Arthur Berman via ArtBerman.com,

Congress ended the U.S. crude oil export ban last week. There is apparently no longer a strategic reason to conserve oil because shale production has made American great again. At least, that’s narrative that reality-averse politicians and their bases prefer.

"This year is a wake-up call to think about lower returns for the next several years," notes BMO's Lowell Yura, warning that "investor expectations for both equities and bonds have been [mistakenly] elevated by recent history." According to data compiled by Bianco Research, 2015 could be the worst for asset allocation funds since World War I. Simply put, nothing worked, as for the first time since 2001, none of the major asset-classes returned more than 10%.

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Earlier today, we parsed Saudi Arabia’s budget report in order to determine if the kingdom’s fiscal nightmare was better or worse than market expectations. 

As it turns out, it was better. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at around 15-16% of GDP, considerably below the 20% some analysts feared. For 2016, it looks as though the number should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 13%, broadly in line with expectations.