The Deutsche Bank story has evolved rapidly this morning: Bloomberg reports that Deutsche Bank had attracted a “new top investor” in the ongoing process of its endless restructuring, then Handelsblatt tweeted that Morgan Stanley acquired a 6.68% shareholding on behalf of activist investors.
Last week, Capital One Financial (COF) announced that is was formally withdrawing from the residential mortgage loan market. Some observers mistook this announcement for news, thinking that COF had actually been engaged in residential lending in a serious way. Housing Wire, for example, reported that COF had “suddenly” exited the mortgage and home equity business.
The euphoria of the past month has ended with a thud and BTFDers are strangely missing as the commodity chill out of China (which overnight became full blown carnage), has unleashed a global risk-off phase ahead of today's critical CPI data, resulting in broad and sharp selling across global markets, as European stocks followed declines in Asia while bonds and gold advanced. The equity retreat, which spread to U.S. stock futures, started with last night's sharp puke in Chinese commodities.
Sweden’s property bubble is probably the world’s biggest, despite which it gets relatively little coverage in the mainstream financial media - although that might be about to change. Warnings about this bubble are not new. In March 2016, Moody’s issued a very explicit warning that Sweden’s negative interest rates were propagating an unsustainable housing bubble.
As we highlighted (see here), China’s macro data for October 2017 was disappointing with retail sales and industrial production missing consensus estimates, fixed asset investment was in line and inflation surprised on the upside. There was some impact from state-driven efforts to reduce pollution, but this issue will be an ongoing headache for decades. In big picture terms, the challenge for the Chinese leadership is to deflate a credit bubble in an orderly fashion, something which we’re not aware has ever been done on this scale.