Business

It is said that the markets will test a new Fed Chair early on and judging by the fact that financial conditions just tumbled to their 'easiest' in 24 years - despite four rate hikes - Jerome Powell will have his work cut out persuading the market that he is serious (before this bubble bursts).

The 'market' behaved as expected after the initial rate hike in Dec 2015 - financial conditions 'tightened' as The Fed 'tightened'. However, since then The Fed has entirely lost control...

The number of US oil rigs contonues to track the lagged price of WTI (lower). For the 4th week in the last 5 (and 10th of last 12), oil rigs declined (down 8 to 729).

This is the biggest absolute rig count drop since May 2016 to the lowest total rig count since May 2017.

35-year-old Jia Chen of Citibank probably has no idea where that title quote above came from.  That's because she was roughly 4 years old when Poltergeist II hit theaters back in 1986...

In the third quarter of 2017, one in which the global economy was supposedly undergoing an unprecedented "coordinated growth spurt", and in which central banks were preparing to unveil their QE tapering intentions, in the case of the ECB, or raising rates outright, at the Fed, what was really taking place was another central bank buying spree meant to boost confidence that things are now back to normal, using "money" freshly printed out of thin air, and spent to prop up risk assets around the world by recklessly buying stocks with no regard for price or cost.

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

In 2008, Zimbabwe suffered the second most severe episode of hyperinflation in recorded history. The annual inflation rate peaked in November 2008, reaching 89.7 sextillion (10^23) percent (see table below).