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A tough week for crude oil, which tumbled after algos tagged $50 stops yesterday following the biggest gasoline inventory build in 7 months. While the US oil rig count has stopped rising in the last few weeks, production continues to hit cycle highs stalling prices, but the Saudis are not giving up on their incessant jawboning - hinting that "deeper cuts" are still on the table.

US oil rig counts rose by 3 to 768 last week - it has fallen 3 times in the last 7 weeks and is practically unchanged in the last 2 months...

The Fed is becoming increasingly trapped: despite the FOMC's "best intentions" to telegraph that the economy is improving with the unemployment rate at a paltry 4.3% - because otherwise it clearly wouldn't be hiking, right - CPI has now missed consensus estimates for 5 consecutive months, and what worse, the biggest historical driver of inflation in recent years, shelter and rent inflation, appears to have peaked and is now declining. Worse, wage inflation is nowhere to be found, much as one would expect from a bartender and waiter-led "recovery."

How fast the fortunes of the world's richest shift: just two weeks ago, when AMZN hit its all time high on July 27, its CEO Jeff Bezos briefly surpassed Bill Gates as the world's richest man for the first time ever, despite growing rumors and rumblings of regulatory pushback against Amazon which is rapidly emerging as the biggest monopoly threat to established legacy industries.

Authored by Thorstein Polleit via The Mises Institute,

If you invest your money, you will have to deal with numerous risks. For instance, if you buy a bond, you run the risk of the borrower defaulting or being repaid with debased money. As a stock investor, you face the risk that the company's business model will not live up to expectations, or that it, at the extreme, will go bankrupt. In an unhampered financial market, prices are formed for these and other risk factors.

Following 'disappointing' (to some) producer price data, consumer prices missed expectations for the 5th month in a row with a mere 0.1% rise MoM (0.2% exp). Year-over-year growth in core consumer prices also slowed for the 7th straight month dropping to just 1.7% - the slowest since Jan 2015. Amid this dismal report, there is a silver lining for Americans, the cost of shelter rose just 0.1% - the smallest rise since March.

The breakdown by components

Source: @SmithEconomics