In September, interbank credit markets flashed a quick and brief warning that something was up... and Janet folded. Three months later and following The Fed's oddly-timed rate-hike, interbank counterparty risk - as proxied by the TED-Spread - has spiked over 45% in 2 days, the most since Sept 2008 (Lehman).
Back in August of 2014, Portugal had an idea.
Lisbon would use some €5 billion from the country’s Resolution Fund to shore up (read: bailout) Portugal’s second largest bank by assets, Banco Espirito Santo. The idea, basically, was to sell off Novo Banco SA (the "good bank" that was spun out of BES) in relatively short order and use the proceeds to pay back the Resolution Fun. That way, the cost to taxpayers would be zero.
You didn’t have to be a financial wizard or a fortune teller to predict what was likely to happen next.
Submitted by Matt Smith via OilPrice.com,
Seventy-eight years after Walt Disney released the first full-length animated feature, and seven factors in today’s crude complex are dwarfing crude prices.
Happy – Let’s start off with the good news: retail gasoline prices have dropped below $2/gallon on the national average. Prices have broken below the lows seen earlier in the year, and are now at their lowest levels since early 2009.
Earlier this year, we posited that the markets were reaching the point at which a significant percentage of investors no longer had faith in Central Banks’ abilities to put off the business cycle.
This now appears to be the case. In the last month, three Central Banks have announced policy changes. All three of these changes were alleged to be bullish in nature.
They were:
1) The European Central Bank (ECB) cutting rates further into NIRP and extending its QE program through March 2017.
Over the weekend, using the latest Commitment of Traders data, we showed something gold-traders had been aware in recent months (and years): "having closed lower for 8 of the last 9 weeks, gold has become the momentum-chasing hedge fund community's latest target.... Managed Money added to its already record short position in gold futures this week, pushing the leveraged bets to the most extremely bearish in history."