Business

As a reminder, nothing lasts forever...

The World Bank's former chief economist wants to replace the US dollar with a single global super-currency, saying it will create a more stable global financial system.

"The dominance of the greenback is the root cause of global financial and economic crises," Justin Yifu Lin told Bruegel, a Brussels-based policy-research think tank.

 

"The solution to this is to replace the national currency with a global currency."

Authored by Mike Shedlock via TheMaven.net/MishTalk,

The Illinois legislature is in recess right now. Other than disbanding the body, that's the best place for them.

When they return, they are going after your pocketbook in the form a gas tax hike. Not to be outdone, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pondering property tax hikes.

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist,

I have been meaning to write this post for quite some time. As an ex-ETF trader, I have watched with bemusement as investors have both embraced and shuddered at the wide adoption of ETFs. But most pundits are missing the larger picture. ETFs are just a symptom of the bigger phenomenon. The true battle lies in the passive versus active debate.

For today's moment of volatility zen, we go to BofA's Nikolay Angeloff who drew the short straw to be the (un)lucky pundit whose comments on record complacency, low volatility, etc publicized.

Angeloff starts with pointing out what we noted over the weekend , namely that we have now recorded 334 days without a 5% or more pullback (and 335 after today's close), the fourth longest period on record since 1928.

In the U.S., equity markets have officially reached the phase in the bubble where fundamentals are almost entirely irrelevant and stocks trade up irrespective of whether company earnings are positive or negative...in technical terms you could say we're in the later stages of the BTFD phase of the economic cycle.