Business

The Bank of Japan may or may not be tapering, but that may soon be moot because by the time Kuroda decides whether he will buy less bonds, the bond market may no longer work.

As the Nikkei reports, while the Japanese central bank ponders its next step, the Japanese rates market has been getting "Ice-9ed" and increasingly paralyzed, as yields on newly issued 10-year Japanese government bonds remained flat for seven straight sessions through Friday while the BOJ continued its efforts to keep long-term interest rates around zero. 

Authored by Jeff Paul via ActivistPost.com,

In November of last year, India banned certain cash notes in a bold move to force businesses into the banking system to better harvest more taxes from its livestock.

Now, under the guise of “improving transparency” and forming a “common market,” India has begun targeting gold with new taxes, regulation, and incentives for citizens to turn over their undeclared gold to the financial sector.

Dan Loeb has returned to his earthshaking activist roots, and in a letter released moments ago, Third Point announced it is now targeting the world’s largest food company, with its biggest bet on a public company in its history, amounting to $3.5 billion.

Two weeks after the first, and biggest, European bank bail-in took place under the relatively new European bank resolution mechanism, the EBRD, when Spain's Banco Popular wiped out the holders of its most risky securities, including equity and AT bonds, and then selling what was left of the bank to Santander for €1 - a process that took place without a glitch -  Italy may have just killed any hope of a European banking union, when the bailout of two small banks made a "mockery" of Europe's new regulation.

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

The Federal Reserve is now setting out on a new path for quantitative tightening (QT) after nine years of unconventional quantitative (QE) easing policy. It is the evil twin of QE which was used to ease monetary conditions when interest rates were already zero.