Business

In his latest note, SocGen's permaskeptic Albert Edwards looks back 20 years in time to the Asian Crisis, and makes an interesting observations: nothing has really changed. In fact, as he explains, the events over the past 2 decades have been a "linear progression of the monetary madness that followed the 1997 Asian", and all thanks to central bankers who used the crisis as a springboard for ever more drastic monetary interventions, resulting in one bubble after another, culminating with the current state of the world, to wit:

S&P futures are sliding this morning, down 0.4% and tracking the accelerating decline in European and Asian stocks, driven by a move higher in global interest rates, which started with Japanese 10Y yields rising to 0.1% for the first time since February, but mostly Bund yields which spiked after tripping stops, and jumped as high as 0.53% for the first time since early 2016. Oil climbs, dollar and gold slide. Economic data include initial jobless claims, trade balance, Markit PMI readings.

Via KesslerCompanies.com,

With all the talk of central bank hawkishness in the last week, one might assume there was some inflation to point to. It is quite the opposite. It is one thing to talk about inflation being below the Fed’s target of 2%, it is an entirely different issue to see it flirting with deflation! Shorter-term trends of core-inflation are very near to 0%, levels we haven’t seen since the great recession and the advent of quantitative easing.

Brexit negotiations officially began three weeks ago, and whether the UK will retain access to the European Union’s single financial market once they’re over is unknown. Yet that hasn’t stopped regulators on the Continent from taking a swipe at more than a trillion euros in assets, and thousands of well-paying finance jobs required to manage them, that they think belong on the other side of the English Channel.

About 70% of college students – equal to about 44 million Americans - owe a collective $1.4 trillion in student debt. And while the standard repayment plan for federal loans suggests that they should take no more than 10 years to pay back, in reality, it regularly takes twice that long.