Business

Six years ago, Kyle Bass provided a crucial context for the debt-laden world of ever-increasing sovereign debt:

"Buying gold is just buying a put against the idiocy of the political cycle. It's That Simple"

And now, as interest in Bitcoin surges, Arthur Hayes, a former CitiGroup trader who runs BitMEX - a Hong Kong-based crypto exchange - asks an interesting question - In the coming war between digital currencies, which side will your money be on?

Austria, a country which itself is less than 100 years old, made European history today when it launched a 100-year government bond: the first such deal to be sold into eurozone public markets. While Austria is not the first nation to sell 100 year bonds - last year Ireland and Belgium both sold privately-placed century-long bonds - while Austria itself sold a 70 year bond, Austria’s planned 100-year bond is unique in that it would be the first such debt sold directly into public markets in the eurozone according to the WSJ.

Authored by Peter Tchir via Brean Capital,

I wish it was Sunday‘Cause that’s my fun dayIt’s just another melt-up Monday

The S&P 500 has rallied 1% or more four times this year – three of those have been on Mondays (4 out of the 7 largest upside moves this year in the S&P 500 have been Monday’s).

Unlike in the good old days where Merger Monday mania drove Wall Street, it has been – take your hedges off Monday that has driven the returns.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

John Hussman’s presents a message no one wants to hear because nearly everyone is too busy believing for the third time in 17 years that “It’s different this time”.

Last week Hussman wrote about Valuations, Sufficient Statistics, and Breathtaking Risks. This week it’s more of the same with his post Behind the Potemkin Village.

The markets are so overvalued now that Hussman expects a 60% decline from here.

Confirming Monday leaks that OPEC production had dipped last month, the just released OPEC report for the month of September confirmed that in September, OPEC produced 32.755mmb/d (according to secondary source data), a drop of 79,100 bpd, and the first monthly decline in 4 months.  According to the underlying data, in the last month output increased in Nigeria (+138.3Kb/d), while declining in Libyam Gabon, Venezuela and Iraq. Saudi Arabia.