Business

One week ago, in his weekly "flow report", BofA's Michael Hartnett looked at the "Disconnect Myth" between rising stocks and sliding yields and succinctly said that there is "no disconnect between stocks & bonds."

Why? The reason for low yields and high stocks was simple: trillions in central bank intervention. The result is an era of lower yields & higher stocks, or as the chart above shows, an era in which the alligator jaws of death are just waiting for their moment to shine. Here are the three phases:

As Texas slowly normalizes from Hurricane Harvey's impact, production has rebounded but the rig count continues to tumble (down 7 to 749 this week). This is the biggest weekly drop in oil rigs since Jan 2017 and June 2016. WTI Crude futures have once again tested $50 (and failed) this morning.

This is the 5th week in a row with no increases in oil rig counts.

Authored by Cyril Widdershoven via OilPrice.com,

The long-awaited Saudi Aramco IPO, scheduled for mid-2018, could be delayed to 2019.

International news reports have stated that the Saudi government is currently putting together contingency plans for a possible delay to the biggest IPO ever. The listing of 5 percent of Saudi Arabia’s crown jewel, the world’s largest oil company Saudi Aramco, could bring in around $300-$400 billion, based on a valuation of Aramco at between $1.5-2 trillion.

Two days after the WSJ confirmed Maduro's earlier threat that he would stop accepting US Dollars as payment for crude oil imports, Venezuela has done just that.

As a reminder, and as we reported previously, in an effort to circumvent U.S. sanctions, Venezuela told oil traders that it will no longer receive or send payments in dollars. As a result, oil traders who export Venezuelan crude or import oil products into the country have begun converting their invoices to euros.

Back in January 2017, we predicted that this year would be a year of a $USD collapse. At that time it was obvious to us, plain as day, that the Trump administration would want a weak $USD in order to implement its economic policies.

Since then, the $USD has collapsed against every major world currency: Euros, Yen, Francs, you name it, the $USD has dropped against it.

And this trend is nowhere near over. For those who still don’t believe that the $USD is heading DOWN, consider the yesterday’s quote from Trump’s TOP ECONOMICS GUY, Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin.