Business

With memories of last week's high-volume, post-Fed, quad-witching selloff fading fast, overnight the Santa rally defined as no volume, no breadth levitation, has continued for a third day and moments ago European stocks rose to their best level of the day, with the Stoxx Europe 600 Index headed for its biggest advance in a week, while US equity futures ramped on the European open as they traditionally do, and then again hit session highs minutes ago, as holiday volumes are in meltdown mode, and oddlots can move the E-mini by 1 point.

While Sweden is over-flowing with excess cash on bank balance sheets, it appears that banks in Hong Kong are desperate to borrow Yuan (or scared to lend) as overnight HIBOR just exploded higher to 9.45% - a record for the interbank offered rate. The HKD and CNY/CNH FX markets remain relatively stable (with Yuan fixed marginally higher again for the 3rd day).

From sub-2% a week ago (before The Fed hiked rates) to 9.45%, the overnight rates has exploded...

When it comes to explaining why the post-crisis world has been defined by lackluster aggregate demand and a deceleration in global trade, all roads lead to China. 

Indeed, the country’s attempt to mark a difficult transition from an investment-led, smokestack economy to a consumption and services-led model has contributed mightily to an epic downturn in commodities which has in turn conspired with an expected Fed tightening cycle and a laundry list of country-specific political risk factors to push EM to the brink of disaster. 

Submitted by Samuel Bryan via SchiffGold.com,

A paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms that a large percentage of the increase in college tuition can be explained by increases in the amount of available financial aid.

First it was Dropbox.

In late October ago we reported that one of the numerous "unicorns" prancing around Silicon Valley was about to have a very rude wake up call when Dropbox was warned by its investment bankers that it would be unable to go public at a valuation anywhere near close to what its last private round (which had most recently risen to $10 billion from $4 billion a year ago) valued it at.

Than it was Jack Dorsey's "other" company, Square (which soon may have a higher valuation than Twitter).