Business

Three words... "not unequivocally good."

For the first time since February 2009, WTI Crude is trading with a $35 handle...

We have been almost alone in our exclamations at the collapsing offshore Yuan in the last few days but since The IMF blessed China's currency with inclusion in The SDR, CNH is down 13 handles. However, now we appear to have an answer. Overnight saw commentary from CFETS (China's FX market 'manager') that indicated implicitly that Trade-Weighted Yuan was still trading too high.

Following a miss in retail sales (if slight beat in core spending), the final key economic update the Fed will look at before its "first rate hike in nine years" meeting next week is today's Producer Price Inflation report which rose 0.3%, above the expected unchanged print and even higher compared to October's -0.4% decline.

Despite all the industry's exuberance over auto sales in America, the government's retail sales data shows vehicle sales dropped 0.4% in October (in other words, automakers are channel-stuffing). This rolled through the various headline data leaving a 4th miss in a row MoM and the weakest YoY growth for retail sales since Nov 2009 - deep in recession territory.

This is the 4th miss in a row for the headline retail sales data...

And sends the annual growth rate well into recession territory...

The shocking fate of Third Avenue's junk bond fund, which as we reported yesterday, announced it would gate investors and proceed to liquidate over the next several months as it sought to unwind its illiquid positions at a leisurely pace "without resorting to sales at prices that would unfairly disadvantage the remaining shareholders" is made just modestly less shocking when one considers that the $789 million fund (down from $2.4 billion earlier this year) was the worst performing YTD fund tracked by Morningstar, tumbling 27% YTD, but only after placing in the top 1%-percentile in 2013.