Business

While The FOMC statement yesterday had a little for everyone (dovish inflationary comments and hawkish employment and balance sheet normalization), the bottom line is that, as former fund manager Richard Breslow notes, Yellen has kicked the can down the road one more time to avoid making any decision before the start of autumn: "they are only human and well aware of the fact that August has repeatedly been a cruel month for upsetting their best-laid plans for September."

Via Bloomberg,

The Trump fiscal agenda - which these days really means tax reform - may be dead, but that does not mean it can't reemerge as a zombie every now and then. That's precisely what happened moments ago when Paul Ryan just announced that after months of speculation whether border adjustment tax will or won't be implemented to help offset Trump's proposed tax cuts, it is now officially dead.

• RYAN IS SAID TO BE TELLING REPUBLICANS BORDER TAX IS DEAD: BBG

As Reuters adds:

Authored by Thorstein Polleit via The Mises Institute,

The Federal Reserve (Fed) is widely expected to continue to tighten its monetary policy this year. According to a latest Reuters Poll, the Fed is likely to start shrinking its US$4 trillion balance sheet in September and, moreover, raise further its key interest rate, which is currently standing in a range of 1.0 to 1.25 percent, in the fourth quarter this year.

While nobody knows what catalyzed for the sharp selloff over the last hour, with Citi blaming it on Acrophobia, or fear of heights, saying  that "US equities opened at record highs, key levels were being approached in fixed income while USD enjoyed a bid across the board... However since then, it looks like markets have gotten a small case of cold feet", Bloomberg had a different idea, when it observed that stocks erased gains around 12:30 p.m. as S&P 500 fell 0.5% over 60 minutes to low of 2,469.51.

Having emerged as one of the most macro saavy UBS strategists, Arend Kapteyn - who several months ago first highlighted the unprecedented crash in China's credit impulse - points out something he first highlighted several months ago: a "surprising" paradox in which despite "signs of economic strength" across the developed markets, these same markets had yet to register any pick up in imports, or as Kapteyn puts it, "one of the most surprising charts of the year, for us at least, has been the one below: despite the strength of growth in the Eurozone, Japan and other parts of