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With the Fed continuing to hike rates, it should come as no surprise that today's 2Y auction printed at a high yield of 1.348%, the highest stop out since October 2008. And perhaps because the yield was so high, it invited significant buyside demand, mostly from foreign central banks, with the auction stopping through the When Issued of 1.354% by 0.6 bps, the same as last month, and demonstrating surprising demand for the short end of the curve.

Two years after correctly abandoning his long-held bullish perspective on the US economy's growth prospects, Deutsche Bank's chief economist Joe LaVorgna has reportedly left the bank, "planning to work elsewhere in financial services."

Some may recall, that back in 2013, we noted that when it comes to forecasting the future, even one Groundhog Phil has a success rate of 71%, or over a standard deviation more accurate compared to Joe "Coin Toss" LaVorgna's 51%.

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,

There has been a whole lot of ink spilled on the reason for the Fed’s recent break from data dependence. Many pundits believe the Federal Reserve’s hawkish guidance, even in the face of low inflation readings, is a partisan attempt by Yellen & Co. to derail the weak recovery. I don’t buy that argument. To think the FOMC board would leave rates easy for Obama or Hillary, but raise them for Trump is just foolish. The Fed might be incompetent, but they aren’t so blatantly biased.

After surging in early trading, the Nasdasq - together with various cryptocurrencies - suddenly slumped and dropped as much as 1% from its intraday highs two hours into trading. That's what traders could agree with; where they clearly disagreed, was on the reason for the swoon with everything from the velocity of last week’s rally, this morning’s economic data and the Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments on the Trump administration’s travel ban and being cited according to Bloomberg.

One month ago, Goldman spotted a curious divergence in the energy sector: whereas in 2015 and 2016, the energy-linked asset class that had the highest beta to crude and was the most impacted as a result of the plunge in oil prices, was debt and specifically junk bonds while equities were relatively resilient to crashing crude prices, in 2017 this relationship had flipped, and - as of mid-May - despite the latest tumble in oil prices, HY Energy credits had returned 2.3% vs. 3.3% for the broader HY index, while Energy equities were down a whopping 9.6%.